Contextual Targeting When The Context Is Other Ads

Ian Schafer (whose commentary I unfairly bashed in a recent post), comments on YouTube’s new efforts to sell ads that will appear next to “pre-viral” (Ian’s phrase). What’s more interesting to me is the fact that pre-viral videos are, almost by definition, advertisements themselves.

Similarly, IMDB is showing pre-roll ads before movie trailers now. And movie trailers, of course, are advertisements.

What does it mean when smaller advertisers consider bigger advertisers’ ads to be actual content? What kind of targeting is happening when the context you’re targeting to is another ad?

If you are managing a small, weak brand, and you’re certain that you want to appeal to exactly the same people that the established brand is appealing to, and you’re sure that they’re doing it better than you, then I guess it makes a sort of sense. But really, if you’ve thought it through that far, wouldn’t it make sense to put the same amount of effort and analysis into determining where you can hit your customers when they’re not so distracted? Not just distracted by content, which is meant to inform or entertain, but by an actual ad, which was created to distract, and to suck attention away from the things around it?

Actually, according to The Online Advertising Playbook, ads for certain types of products perform much better when they are behaviorally targeted, but not contextually targeted. Which is to say, it’s the very fact that they are not displayed in the vicinity of anything vaguely related, that makes them stand out.