05:50    Silver Push

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Contextual Targeting Boosts Ad Relevance, User Engagement and Campaign Performance

Contextual targeting offers a smart and powerful way to advertisers for promoting brands and their products, while to publishers, it offers an effective way for monetizing their content. In the era of online privacy regulations and cookie-less advertising, industry experts predict it to become the mainstream advertising approach.     

Contextual targeting involves placement of those ads that are in line with the context of the content the user is engaging with. Whether an ad is placed against a video or textual content, if it is in context to what a user is watching or reading, he/she finds it relevant, less annoying, and more appealing to see it or click it.

Traditionally, contextual advertising is practiced by placing ads on the basis of keywords and topics. But this approach has its own shortcomings, for example, keywords cannot fully reflect the users’ current state of mind. Keyword-based contextual advertising often results in sub-optimal campaigns.

Using artificial intelligence for contextual targeting offers far better results in comparison to conventional keyword-based ad targeting. This is because AI advertising does not follow the keyword-based approach, but rather uses machine learning and computer vision to identify contexts in content, and then serve the ads that are contextually relevant. Thus, contextual targeting using artificial intelligence advertising technology boosts the relevance factor in ad targeting.

Video is becoming the most sought-after content on the internet. For marketers, video advertising is becoming one of the most effective ways to reach consumers. Computer vision powered in-video contextual advertising has emerged as the most effective and safe way to promote brands and their products by leveraging the popularity and reach of online video content

Computer vision powered in-video contextualadvertising works by identifying contexts in videos such as faces, emotions, objects, logos, scenes and activities. Relevant ads are served that are in line with the detected contexts, thus making the ads more engaging to the users of online video platforms such as YouTube.

Research has shown significantly positive impact of the contextual video advertising on the performance of ad campaigns in comparison to displaying ads irrespective of the context of the video content being watched.

Contextual in-video advertising offers significant benefits over non-contextual video advertising including the following -

·       When contextually relevant in-video ad is served, the ad receives higher attention from users in comparison to random ads. The chances of user interaction with the ad increases.  

          Contextual advertising enhances a brand’s outreach, awareness and perception. A brand’s image improves in terms of quality, value for money, and appeal. Users find the brand to be more reliable and authentic. 

·       By displaying contextually relevant in-video ads, which are more engaging and less annoying than random ads, the perception of the websites or online video platforms that host videos also improves in the minds of users.    

·       Brands are able to convert more people into customers, sales increase, and return on investment (ROI) gets boosted.      

Contextual advertising dramatically increases user engagement and reach for brands by serving consumers ads that are relevant to the content they are engaging with. Overall, contextual targeting is beneficial for all - brands, agencies, publishers, and consumers.   

   

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  03:24    Silver Push

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Contextual Targeting Offers the Most Viable Advertising Strategy in the GDPR Era

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has changed the way businesses can handle the personal data of the citizens of the European Union. Any individual, company or organization, whether located in EU or not, that stores or processes EU citizens’ personal data must comply with the GDPR. The GDPR, which came into effect on 25 May 2018, enables EU citizens to exercise control over their personal data.

Article 4(1), defines personal data as follows –

“Personal data means any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person (data subject); an identifiable natural person is one who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identifier such as a name, an identification number, location data, an online identifier or to one or more factors specific to the physical, physiological, genetic, mental, economic, cultural or social identity of that natural person.”

Online advertising industry is one of the most affected industries by the GDPR. Online advertisers use third-party cookies as the main tool to track users’ online activities for serving them highly specific ads. Cookies are small text files that gets stored in the users’ web browsers.

Third-party cookies serve as a trace for advertisers. Through third-party cookies, advertisers are able to create a rich profile of users that include the websites they visit, their interests, products they buy, and more. Third-party cookies store enough user data to come under the GDPR scanner. 

According to the CIGI-Ipsos Global Survey on Internet Security and Trust 2019, in which more than 25,000 internet users participated from twenty-five countries across the globe, - In 2019, 78% of survey respondents said they were very concerned or somewhat concerned about their online privacy. 53% said they were much more concerned or somewhat more concerned than they were a year ago. While 78% of all respondents in 2019 were concerned about their online privacy, 90% or more were concerned in Egypt, Hong Kong, India, Nigeria, and Mexico, with more than 85% concerned in South Africa, Indonesia, and South Korea.

With rising privacy concerns among the consumers, coming into effect of the GDPR and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), and the gradual phasing-out of third-party cookies in Chrome by Google, the digital marketers have started looking into alternate ways delivering online ads to consumers that are both effective and compliant with the personal data protection regulations. 

In the era of GDPR and other online privacy laws, contextualtargeting offers an effective way for advertisers to display online ads, while being compliant with the privacy regulation. Contextual advertising allows advertisers to display ads on a website by targeting its content. Ads are displayed on the basis of keywords or topics. This method, therefore, displays ads that are relevant to the content, and hence, increases the chances of users clicking on the ads. For example, if a brand wants to sell smartphones, then it can have its ads placed on the websites that have content about smartphones, gadgets, technology, etc.

An advanced form of contextual advertising involves semantic targeting, which makes use of machine learning algorithms to understand the meaning of each page of content on a website, rather than just looking for keywords placed on a web page.

As with text content, contextual targeting offers a GDPR compliant advertising solution for video content. Conventional contextual video advertising works by identifying keywords. This often results in placement of irrelevant ads. 

The innovative artificial intelligence and computer vision powered in-video contextual advertising technology overcomes the limitations of traditional contextual advertising. It offers an effective, GDPR-compliant solution to advertisers for displaying contextually relevant in-video ads to users. It works by detecting faces, objects, emotions, logos, activities and scenes in video content. It then serves the ads that are fully in line with what the user is currently watching, thus allowing for a very high chance of user engagement.       

The contextual, artificial intelligence advertising does not collect, store or utilize users’ personal data for displaying ads, thus offering a GDPR-compliant approach. It only considers what a user is currently engaging with and serves him the contextually relevant ads.

The AI-powered contextual targeting is highly effective for the advertisers, non-annoying for the consumers, and in compliance with the GDPR.     

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Silverpush Creates Award-Winning Campaigns with Top Brands In MENA

Silverpush Creates Award-Winning Campaigns with Top Brands In MENA

  02:10    Silver Push

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Wins 4 MMA MENA Smarties awards across 3 key categories - innovation, cross-device and programmatic.

The outstanding campaigns created by Silverpush performed brilliantly at the MMA MENA Smarties Awards ceremony held on February 10th at Five Palm Jumeirah, Dubai, by winning one Gold, two Silvers and one Bronze.

Signal and Magna Global & Silverpush won a Gold award under the cross-media category for the Signal – UNICEF campaign. Again, for the cross-media category, Nissan Middle East and OMD UAE & Silverpush won a Silver for the Nissan Middle East – Cricket World Cup Live Sports SYNC campaign. Telfast (Sanofi) and Mindshare & Silverpush won a Silver and Bronze for the Telfast Weather Sync *Achoo* campaign under the programmatic and innovation categories respectively.

All of the campaigns were powered by Silverpush’s real-time moment marketing platform – Parallels. Parallels enable effective real-time TV ad sync and real-time live moments sync.

Signal partnered with Magna Global and Silverpush to launch a CSR UNICEF campaign to promote oral health in Egypt. Silverpush created real-time ad sync between Signal toothpaste commercial on local Egyptian TV and Signal’s ad on high-reach social media platforms - Facebook and Instagram. Thus, those viewers that shifted their focus to their smartphones during ad-breaks were effectively targeted. The TV commercial promoted dental hygiene to kids while the ad on social media platforms delivered a message about the product benefits. Apart from self-sync, Silverpush also created a competition-sync to show Signal’s ad on Facebook and Instagram when a competitor’s toothpaste ad aired on the TV. 

The campaign turned out to be highly effective. The campaign achieved a video view rate of 28%, which was 4 times higher than obtained with the non-sync campaign. A post-engagement rate of 28.5% was achieved which significantly surpassed the earlier rate of 0.07%. The completed view rate that started with 49% reached a whopping 72% by the end of the campaign. What is worth noting and interesting is that out of the total video views delivered, 73% were watched with sound on. The campaign achieved an impressive estimated ad recall lift rate of 7.3%.

For Nissan’s campaign, Silverpush leveraged its real-time live sports sync technology. For four years, Nissan has been the sponsor of the International Cricket Council. To strengthen the association of Nissan with cricket, Silverpush ran a campaign during the World Cup on Facebook.

Silverpush found that only 15 decisive minutes of the game get debated again and again. These are the best moments for connecting a brand with the consumers. Silverpush capitalized on these moments by syncing them with the relevant content on Facebook. Being related to the key game moments, this content was found more engaging by the fans and made Nissan a part of this engaging experience. Nissan's brand relevance rose by 21%, purchase intent increased by 5% and brand image improved by 10%.   

For Sanofi’s anti-allergic Telfast tablets, Silverpush ran a moment marketing campaign, powered by weather sync technology, in the Middle East. In the Middle East, weather changes frequently, even during the same day. Due to this, people there are affected by allergic rhinitis all year long, unlike those in other parts of the world.

Silverpush identified specific weather conditions that lead to a surge in allergic rhinitis. Depending upon the weather conditions and other triggers such as dust, mold, mites, etc., the most relevant ad messages were communicated to consumers in real-time. The results of the campaign were highly impressive. Over double-digit growth in sales occurred during the campaign duration. The view rates touched the sky and the ads that ran only during the weather triggers performed 85 times better than others. Trigger targeting increased click-through rate by 111%. 

Silverpush’s prime focus has always been to deliver highly effective campaigns through its innovative technology to provide unprecedented reach and user engagement to brands and impactful brand experience to users. Silverpush’s award-winning campaigns serve as a testimony to this fact. 

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We Are Excited to Announce Our New Brand Identity

We Are Excited to Announce Our New Brand Identity

  02:41    Silver Push

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We are delighted to announce our new brand identity as part of the ongoing evolution of our brand. Our business has grown, our technology has evolved, we are digging into new areas and have launched new products, and so we thought that it’s time for a change. We have refreshed our logo and website to reflect who we are today and to symbolize our future.

Our new brand identity resonates with our focus on AI-powered in-video ads contextual advertising. The new brand identity perfectly aligns our company with our successful foray into offering cutting edge AI-powered solutions that are redefining limits of in-video contextual targeting.

With blue and green colors in our new website, we have centered our new identity around AI and technology, keeping it modern and focused on trust. The yellow color imbibes the fresh and playful characteristics of the brand - offering flexibility for future innovation. These branding elements have also translated into a new logo, which projects motion and pace.

in-video ads

We started our journey in 2012 as the first Demand Side Platform in India. Since then, we have brought many innovative products to the market, including the first of its kind Cross-Device Ad Targeting solution launched in 2014, and the Real-time Moment Marketing platform, Parallels, in 2018.

We launched Mirrors, the first computer-vision powered in-video contextual advertising platform, in 2019. Mirrors is able to effectively detect contexts like faces, objects, activities, emotions, scenes and logos in a streaming video for placement of context-relevant ads. Through Mirrors, we have helped some of the largest brands in world in achieving unprecedented reach and user engagement.

Our new brand identity helps us in effectively bringing into light our three inherent characteristics – creator, explorer and jester.

As a creator, we love to focus on innovation and quality. We always want to contribute to society by bringing something new into being, i.e. by realizing a vision. We draw deep satisfaction from our efforts of creating something new that did not previously exist but has the potential to revolutionize the industry. Our in-video contextual advertising platform based on artificial intelligence (AI) and computer vision is a product of our creator mind and is ushering a new era in ad tech industry.     

   

Our explorer characteristic is exhibited in our desire and efforts to do groundbreaking and pioneering work. We want to have an explorer’s attitude towards the work we do and the way we do it. We don’t want to take the conventional, pre-defined path, but want to pave our own path and discover our own way of doing things so that we can bring ingenious products in the market. We want to be free from constraints, feel the freedom to explore the technology in our own way, and enjoy our discoveries and innovations. Our explorer trait makes us utilize our capacities to the fullest, thereby allowing us to push the boundaries.             

Computer Vision Applications

Our fun-loving, light-hearted and playful approach is a reflection of our jester trait. We think outside the box to develop innovative products that make people feel good. We combine fun with creativity and intelligence to offer ingenious solutions to ad tech industry. Being quick-witted, highly adaptable and resourceful, we reframe concepts, present new perspectives and stir up changes. Our jester trait helps us to easily navigate through difficult times and emerge as a real winner.  

With this new company branding, we have now moved beyond our legacy. We have always been a first mover in problems we have solved before, be it disrupting cross-device tracking or effective push notifications. We are now completely focused on transforming how advertisers reach their customers contextually with our unique offerings, and our new brand identity reflects this. Our tryst with AI and emerging technologies will continue and we will be launching new line of innovative products for the advertising industry in the future.

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Brand Safety Is Indispensable for Video Advertising

Brand Safety Is Indispensable for Video Advertising

  22:58    Silver Push

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The placement of ads against video content has emerged as one of the most effective marketing strategies for brands. Placing ads on user-generated videos on platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and more, provides brands a much wider reach than provided by TV and print media. Despite their vast reach, these social media platforms have their own pitfalls. One of them that is really damaging for the brands is the difficulty in ensuring brand safety.    

The term “Brand Safety” has been used to describe the controls that companies in the digital advertising supply chain employ to protect brands against negative impacts on the brand’s consumer reputation associated with specific types of content, criminal activity, and/or related loss of return on investment.

It takes years and significant resources for a brand to build a reputation in the minds of consumers. Even a single less than desired association can heavily tarnish the brand reputation and the consumer’s trust.

Most advertisers today are facing ad placement against unsuitable and potentially harmful content in the following categories that the global digital advertising industry refers to as the “Dirty Dozen” categories to avoid - Military conflict, Obscenity, Drugs, Tobacco, Adult, Arms, Crime, Death/injury, Online piracy, Hate speech, Terrorism, and Spam/harmful sites.

Brand Safety

Data shows that 1 in 10 ad placements are against harmful content. According to a survey, about 80% of consumers will stop or reduce buying products advertised against extreme or violent content and 70% believe the advertiser and the agency are most responsible for a brand’s ad placements.

About 10% of all content on YouTube is brand unsafe. Top unsafe categories on YouTube are violence, adult, extremist, and smoking. In March 2017, YouTube faced massive brand pull for ad placements against extreme content. In January 2018, YouTube partnered with third-party tools for brand protection, but in April in the same year, YouTube brand safety woes resurfaced affecting 300 brands. Google’s estimated loss owing to safety issues affecting brands reached $1 billion in October 2018. Other social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and TikTok have also faced similar issues in recent years.

In Video Ads

Despite stringent measures taken by social media platforms such as keywords, blacklists, and whitelisted channels, safety flair-ups affecting different brands have been constant across these platforms. There are certain reasons that have made it difficult to optimally achieve brand safety on social media platforms without affecting reach and monetization.

The first one is that brand safety is not one size fits all. Excluding the ‘Dirty Dozen’ categories is not an absolute rule. Each brand must define its own guidelines for the inappropriate and damaging context in accordance with its specific needs, values and brand image. Measures and tools for ensuring online brand protection should be able to provide required controls to amplify or lower restrictions to allow a highly customized approach. What is unsafe content for one brand, can be the exact context that can help another brand reach its most relevant audience.

The second reason is using the keywords blacklist as the primary solution. This method often fails to understand the complex undertones and various contexts a single word can be used for. For example, keywords such as gun, kill, explosion, etc. may be used in a safe context like in a movie.

Relying on whitelisted channels limits the true potential offered by social media platforms. Through such channels, brand reach gets limited and even may not reach the right audience. Using whitelisted channels is also quite expensive.

Although video advertising majorly uses programmatic advertising, this approach has a flaw that most brands don’t really know where their online advertising is running. Even hiring professionals to screen content to prevent the placement of in-video ads against unsafe content has not proved to be fully effective as a very large amount of video content is loaded hour after hour.   

Conventional brand safety tools fail to identify the right context. Artificial intelligence solutions such as computer vision provide an answer to this problem. Computer vision makes it possible to detect in-video context with great accuracy, offering unparalleled insight for advertisers to place context-relevant in-video ads in a highly structured and safe manner. 

  

Computer vision enables computers to see, identify and process objects in visual content just like or even better than human vision system. Advanced computer vision algorithms can accurately identify faces, emotions, objects, logos, activities, and scenes, not only in static images but also in streaming videos.

Computer vision 

For in-video contextual ads targeting, computer vision enables a high degree of context relevance that surpasses all limitations of traditional keyword and affinity-based targeting. By using frame by frame parsing of video content, computer vision technology accurately blocks ad placements against unwanted, unsuitable, irrelevant and harmful content, even not letting a single damaging ad placement. Moreover, computer vision offers a tailored approach to a brand, i.e. it blocks only that content which is considered unsafe or unwanted by that brand.

Mirrors, by Silverpush, is an innovative contextual online advertising platform that utilizes computer vision for context-relevant in-video ad placement. Mirrors Safe is a computer vision powered brand safety and control platform, developed by Silverpush, that allows a brand to avoid ad placement against inappropriate or unsafe video content.  

Read our latest whitepaper to get a complete view of the current state of brand safety in video advertising and how AI and computer vision is powering the next-gen tech.

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TV Sync Technology Offers Invaluable Opportunity to Advertisers

TV Sync Technology Offers Invaluable Opportunity to Advertisers

  22:46    Silver Push

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It is now a common thing that a person watching his favorite TV show is having his smartphone in his hand, especially during ad breaks, so that he can remain updated on news, messages, emails and social media.

In a study conducted by Facebook, 94% of the participants held a smartphone in their hands while viewing TV just like holding a TV remote control. Only 53% of the time, participants focused on their television screens. One of the main reasons of shifting their focus was to look into their smartphones.

Other research also shows that majority of the smartphone and tablet users remain active on these gadgets while they are watching TV. The use of second screen has now almost become an integral part of the TV viewing experience.

 TV ad tracking

Thus, chances are great that those using second screen while watching television do not pay attention to TV ads, but rather gaze into their smartphones during ad-breaks. TV ad tracking shows that use of smartphones while watching TV negatively impacts the performance of TV ads. TV sync technology enables brands to reach these viewers through their second screens.

TV syncing works by activating an online ad campaign on a viewer’s smartphone or tablet that is same or related to the ad appearing on his TV. This real-time syncing increases the chances of a viewer’s engagement with the ad being displayed on the mobile device. Not only TV ads, this technology can sync other content on TV such as sporting events, concerts and high-impact TV series, and even things like weather and pollution conditions with small screens.

For advertisers, TV syncing is an invaluable technology as it offers great benefits. Some of these are given here below –

Greater impact

If the same ad is shown on the smartphone as is appearing on the TV, then the impact on the viewer’s mind is much greater than the ad appearing only on a single screen.

Syncing compensates for unviewed TV ads

During ad-breaks, TV viewers often shift their attention to their smartphones. This way the ad presented on the TV gets wasted as it does not generate any engagement. But, when the same ad appears on a viewer’s smartphone, advertisers get a second chance for their ad getting viewed.

TV syncing technology

Increased chances for ads getting viewed over competition

If a brand shows its ads on the mobile devices when on TV the ads of its competitor are appearing, then that brand has higher chances of its ads being viewed as TV viewers are increasingly using their smartphones during TV ad breaks.

Facilitates user interaction

When ads on smartphones coincides with ads on TV, it becomes easy for viewers to interact with them, as on smart phones viewers have to just click on the ads and they are taken to the product’s landing page. For ads appearing on TV, this one-click option is not available, rather viewers have to search for the advertised products on a search engine through their laptops or mobile phones.

Unified brand experience

Syncing across multiple screens allows brands to convey a connected message to consumers, which promotes unified brand experience and allows for greater conversion.   

TV syncing technology along with artificial intelligence advertising is transforming the way advertising is done. Leveraging these advertising technologies, helps brands to increase user engagement, get more ROI and boost their brand value.    

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Computer Vision set to transform Contextual Video Advertising

Computer Vision set to transform Contextual Video Advertising

  01:30    Silver Push

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The growth of video advertising

Over the years, video contextual advertising has taken the center-stage in the online advertising space. Video advertising has become the preferred advertising method for many major brands and publishers. In fact, 2017 was known as the year of “Video Gold Rush” for contextual video advertising. This is with good reason; as when the video is served in the right context, it is far more engaging and effective for creating an impression in the minds of consumers and helping advertisers hit KPIs. 

In a survey by databox, 59.3% of advertisers told videos drove more clicks on Facebook for their ads compared to 29.6% for images. In addition, videos are becoming more accessible throughout the world with increasing data coverage and dropping rates for data. This has led to platforms such as Facebook bringing advertiser-friendly features for videos, and YouTube rising massively in popularity with both viewers and advertisers. The rise of apps such as TikTok and Snapchat, in both developing and developed countries, which are crafted as being video-first speaks about the tremendous popularity of videos. 

Computer Vision

Video Contextual Advertising makes strides

As the inventory for video-based creatives has increased, it has become imperative for advertisers to operate in safe environments as with increased reach, there is an increased risk of ads being misplaced. Misplaced ads run the risk of not resonating with users, but if such ads are placed on objectionable, violent or polarising content, they can do irreparable damage to a brand’s reputation. Therefore, as in-video advertising becomes ubiquitous, technologies such as machine-learning and AI-based context detection have been developed. These technologies help in serving ads on the relevant type of content, by filtering through all eligible content and classifying the content according to the suitability based on geography, brand and the consumers’ frame of mind among other factors. 

The algorithms work by detecting patterns in the relevant types of data and then classifying newer data based on those patterns. Traditionally, this approach was used for keyword and affinity-based classification for ads. The suitability of videos for ad placement was gauged using Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques. While this approach was somewhat effective in identifying the broader category of videos, it is not fool-proof and has led to many leakages in the past. There is a limitation to which such algorithms can filter content as the content being shown in videos may not always relate to the associated keywords, search terms or descriptions. 

Video Advertising

Computer Vision is the key

With the evolution of OTT Computer vision techniques and their combination with AI and machine learning, a powerful tool is now available to advertisers. Using computer vision and AI, it is possible to identify the actual objects, logos, emotions and context of the video with unprecedented accuracy. These can enable the identification of what is actually being shown in the video directly without relying on associations with keywords and affinity of videos, thus overcoming the limitation of previously used algorithms, and ensuring a top-notch brand-safe environment for brands. 

Major companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, IBM, and Apple are continuing to bet on Computer Vision for the future and have made considerable advances in the area. For instance, Facebook can now identify each person from a crowd using facial recognition, while Google can search and index thousands of images through its image search feature. Due to keen interest in the field and momentous advances in the field, computer vision has become increasingly accurate over time. Facebook can now identify people with 83% certainty, even when they are partially or completely blocked from view. 

With these advances, Computer Vision has unlocked a whole new avenue for advertisers. With this, one can identify the brand of clothes someone is wearing, the fabric and color he/she prefers, and in what combination, just from a picture. This information can give deeper insights into consumer preferences. In this case, we examine whether luxury goods are a common part of the consumer’s lifestyle and act accordingly. In videos, identifying key aspects of what is being shown can help advertisers in leveraging associations and consumer preferences for brands. 

MIRRORS

MIRRORS is an AI-based platform that uses computer vision applications for logo and object detection, along with facial recognition and emotion identification for classifying videos for placing the most relevant ads in the right context. Working with brands such as Oreo and KFC in the past, we have helped brands target consumers throughout the world for driving sales. For Oreo, we helped in using the brand’s association with Spiderman, to target consumers in South-East Asia and placing ads for Oreo in a wide range of Spiderman-themed content from animated videos to videos showing DIY craft projects for kids. All of this was done in a completely brand-safe environment, with ads being served on videos that connected with the nature of the brand. 

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