Beyond Brand Safety: When It Comes to YouTube, Context Is King

How to reach the unknown demographic

Context has never been more important for digital video advertisers.

Where ads are placed—and the concern that a brand’s message will show up alongside content that is inappropriate, irrelevant or offensive—is always top-of-mind for digital advertisers. Still, the benefits of contextual targeting go far beyond safety, especially for marketers that are looking to take advantage of YouTube.

Brands know that their audience is on YouTube; after all, it does have over 1 billion global users. The challenge is reaching them with the right message. Audience targeting, which has been a critical strategy in online video, has a context problem on YouTube.

The challenge of shared devices and the unknown audience

With audience targeting, the person you’re paying to reach isn’t necessarily the one seeing your ad. Consider this: A mom logged into her iPad appears to be watching YouTube videos and becomes a target of a health/wellness brand. But in actuality, she’s currently driving her kids to soccer practice and the brand is reaching her son and his friend in the back seat watching Minecraft videos—hardly the target for messaging about women’s digestive health.

Another challenge: As much as 50 percent of YouTube’s audience isn’t logged in, becoming an “unknown” demographic to advertisers. This means brands are leaving half of YouTube’s massive audience on the table. Within this “unknown” environment, advertisers have no idea what the age, gender, interests or viewing histories of those viewers. And that lack of demographic or interest-based data can make it nearly impossible to reach that massive consumer base effectively.

That’s why advertisers looking for more efficient ways to reach their consumers on YouTube must consider context.

Proven results

In a recent internal study, we leveraged Nielsen DAR to measure our contextual approach’s ability to deliver in-demographic reach in the unknown environment. Our hypothesis: Targeting contextually relevant content to audience interests would deliver in-demo reach.

The benefits of contextual targeting go far beyond safety, especially for marketers that are looking to take advantage of YouTube.

Using Zefr’s Beauty package—our content package consisting of videos contextually relevant to major “beauty” categories, from how-to makeup tips and tutorials to “haul” videos highlighting cosmetics purchases—Nielsen measured that 68 percent of the impressions reached women. This number matched Nielsen’s benchmark for logged-in users.

So brands leveraging context not only would get incremental reach, but they’d get contextually relevant reach with brand-safe, high-performing videos.

Context matters

Certainly, this kind of contextual marketing can help identify relevant users and extend the reach of your buys. But it also has other benefits.

Most importantly, it moves product. Contextual targeting on YouTube provides a greater lift in purchase intent than straight demographic targeting—something we’ve proven in various studies. It makes sense. If you’re watching videos of reviews of compact SUVs, chances are you’re in the market for that kind of vehicle. And a message from a car manufacturer or a local auto dealer not only wouldn’t be interruptive but would actually be welcomed. You’d be more likely to engage, recommend the brand and maybe even act on that message.

When consumers seek out and watch video content on YouTube, they are providing distinct signals about what they’re interested in. Zefr’s technology uses these signals to identify, organize and package the best videos for brands on YouTube based on context. So people can be reached when they’re most open to receiving a message about content similar to what they are watching.

The truth is, contextual targeting and audience targeting isn’t a zero-sum game. The marketers that succeed will use contextual signals to bolster and improve their audience targeting, leading to more efficient and higher impact video campaigns . And isn’t that what we want from digital buys?