Back to the future: The renaissance of contextual advertising
With so much attention focussed on audience-based targeting, advertisers have all-but forgotten a form of targeting which once ruled the roost, writes GumGum’s Jon Stubley.
Before the days of internet, there were two main ways to target consumers with advertising: demographic or contextual. Marketers used research to understand who read a particular magazine or newspaper or watched a TV programme and then ads were duly placed in the right context. This meant holiday companies advertised in the travel section, fashion in the fashion pages and on it went. Simple.
Post-internet however, things began to change quickly with the ability to track which sites people had visited giving rise to behavioural advertising. We’ve all got our own stories about being virtually chased during our web sessions with ads for a pair of shoes we once looked at while we browsed a whole range of unrelated sites (and in some cases many months after your initial visit to said shoe site).
