The Truth About Contextual Ads On Television

According to MediaBuyerPlanner (summarizing an article from TVWeek):

Turner Broadcasting is launching a system called TVinContext which will allow advertisers to place ads that are related to the content of the programming.
A movie scene taking place in a cafe might be followed by an ad for coffee, while a wedding scene might be followed by a wedding-ring ad, according to Turner executives.
Like contextual advertising online, Turner believes TVinContext will bring more value to advertisers.

This new type of targeting may be “contextual” according to the dictionary definition of “contextual.” But it’s completely different from what we’ve come to know as online contextual advertising…not just online, but also in print. Here’s why.

Contextual ads appear adjacent to content that the user has already made a decision to engage. So, you’re reading an article about the history of coffee in The Village Voice (could be print or online), and next to the article is an ad for Gorilla Fair-Trade Coffee. Makes sense. The very fact that you were already reading the article indicates that you care, to some degree, about coffee, even if it’s only at this particular moment.

Let’s transfer this example to TV. Suppose you’re watching a documentary about coffee on the History Channel. A segment ends, and there’s a cut to a commercial for Starbucks. Same principle, right? In fact, as we all know, this kind of programming-advertising association already happens all the time. Here, too, the implication is that the viewer’s mind is already open to hearing coffee-related advertising at this particular moment. Why? Because they have chosen to watch a piece of coffee-related programming.

Now imagine that, because you like espionage and Robert Redford (making Three Days Of The Condor your favorite movie), you decide to watch Spy Games on TNT. Redford (older spy) tells Brad Pitt (younger spy) that he has five minutes to infiltrate a stranger’s apartment across the street. Moments later, Pitt appears at the window of that apartment and salutes Redford with a cup of coffee, apparently given him by the elderly tenant. Cut to a commercial for Maxwell House.

Would it work? It will probably work on advertisers, because it has a certain obviousness to it. There’s coffee in the movie, and then there’s coffee in the ad, and the mush-minded viewer unconsciously accepts an association between their enjoyment of the movie and their projected enjoyment of the advertiser’s coffee.
But it’s not that simple. The person drinking coffee may be the villain, or addicted to stimulants, or preparing to commit suicide. Do you really want your coffee to have that association?

This is already a problem for online contextual targeting. You might see, for example, an online column bemoaning the prevalence of video game violence, and next to the article, a contextually targeted ad for the latest edition of Grand Theft Auto. This happens because contextual ads are targeted automatically. Some mechanism scanned the page, found the words “video game” and “violence,” and displayed an ad that was keyed to those words. When this happens, it’s usually funny (or at the worst, slightly offensive) to the one person who sees it happen. Because those ads are displayed dynamically per page view. Other users looking at the same page are probably not seeing the same ads.

On television, mistakes like that will be seen by millions of people at once, and they’ll be embarrassing, for both the network and the advertiser. Even when dynamic contextual TV ad placement is not embarrassing, its effectiveness is going to be up for argument. Buy a contextually targeted ad online, and you either know what you’re getting (e.g. your movie ad will appear in the movie section), or you’ll never see it (for a smattering of random people across the globe, your movie ad will appear next to content that a program has determined to be relevant to your movie). Buy a contextually targeted ad on a TV channel, and it’s going to appear in weird contexts, but you can keep track of each one. You can challenge the network’s contextual targeting choices. You can claim damage to your brand. You can demand a makegood…

i’m not saying that it’s a bad idea, or that I’ll never want to do it myself. But I am saying that before it gets good, it’s going to get very bad.