The Game of Efficiency: Contextual vs Behavioral Advertising

Author: Nobarun Shome Choudhury

K J Somaiya Institute of Management

Having a conversation with your friend on your intentions to buy a new headset and the next thing you see is advertisements and product recommendations of earphones/headsets everywhere over the internet Sounds a familiar instance right?

This might seem magical and so resourceful but what goes behind creating this “magic” is something very scary To provide such customized recommendations, brands keep an eye on the online behaviour of their potential clients. Using third party cookies, brands try to sneak into each and every act of people online, ranging from websites visited, products viewed to even purchases made. Such processes to push relevant advertisements are called Behavioural Advertising, where the individuals are fed the ads which align with their online searches. Many of the giants like Meta, Amazon, Google also seek permissions such as audio and media access, which can lead to a breach of individual privacy. With information attained through such access, one is fed with ads of higher precision.

Diving into a bit more depth of the kind of decision aids, a standard classification that prevails is how interactive the aid is. What also matters is the characteristics of the consumer and what type of decision-making style they might have Broadly, one way to classify consumers is to understand whether they are maximizers, who want to maximize the quality of the decision they are making and look for near perfection, even at the cost of a significant amount of time and effort, or whether they are satisficers, who are satisfied by a good enough match, and do not want to expend much energy into the search for perfection

The Google Fiasco

Google got into a lot of trouble related to privacy when Sundar Pichai and his team had to appear in front of US Judiciary Committee as a part of Congressional hearing The entire team of google was asked questions related to their policies on privacy and customer information gathering and ethical practices with the obtained informaton Most of the answers of Pichai revolved around the fact that, Google gets information about customers, based upon the type of permissions given by them This statement definitely leaves room for doubt and fails to explain to what extent/ are details of an individual exposed to the internet

“OK Google”, the voice assistant of Google operates on taking voice commands from users and searches the internet for options Google claims that on giving audio permission, the voice assistant becomes active on listening to the wake phrase “OK Google” and does not record anything else that we say before the command But with multiple news articles, media coverages and people talking openly about being shown ads when they talk about something related near their phones, shows the unclear lines of regulations that exist surrounding privacy and how it is of much larger concern.

Welcome to a cookieless world

Netizens, as the term suggests are habitual users of the internet who are highly aware of their privacy and how to safeguard it. The rising awareness on data privacy from leading news platforms, social media, judiciary etc. have made people understand how they can securely make sure that they do not leave behind crucial data to be openly exploited.

This changing ecosystem has made life a complete mess for marketeers, who relied on data through cookies to target their TGs The entire internet boom in India which happened after the introduction of Jio, made ease of doing business, an easily achievable feature for businesses, especially the start-ups, as reaching customers became easy because of lower internet package charges, higher bandwidth, easily accessible public data through cookies etc People rejecting cookies is taking away one of the highest prized possessions that the internet boom had to offer. It feels like going back to the pre-fast internet phase, where brands had to struggle to find and target the potential customers. This calls for stern actions which can be a possibility through Contextual advertising.

Back to the basics

With the rising awareness on privacy and reduction in the use of cookies from third party platforms, brands need to move to alternate solutions and not just focus on just reaching the TG Equal importance needs to be given to factors such as relevant content, creativity, positioning, relevance in use etc Such initiatives gives rise to the ace factor named contextual advertising, which was the go-to strategy for any brand before cookies took over Contextual advertising involves showing ads that are contextually relevant to the content a user is consuming This focuses on creating a feeling of need by running relevant ads, such that visitors when visiting a particular platform searching for particular products or services are shown ads which correlate with the content of the platform giving the brand a higher opportunity to connect with the visitors

The New Dawn – Contextual Advertising

A neuroanalytics study on contextual ad effectiveness by GumGum (a contextual intelligence company) and Spark Neuro (a neuroanalytics company) did closed group experimentation using proprietary computer vision and natural language processing technology to found out contextual advertising fared against behavioural advertising. The main point in focus was to understand how an ad’s contextual relevance impacts consumers’ emotion and attention.

from quality of content to somehow reaching eyeballs But now, /brands and agencies need to not just focus on reaching the right TG but also bind them by impactful and meaningful content This allows room for creativity and marketing to come together to produce content that can reach and stay with the TG