GumGum’s Australian country manager has said that the digital advertising industry does not understand or appreciate the actual wants and needs of the customers that it is marketing to.
In an exclusive chat with B&T, Coote, former head of sales at Snap ANZ, said that the industry needed to “take a step back” to see the wood for the trees.
“Sometimes there’s a disconnect in our industry between our industry and what the actual consumer wants and needs,” he said.
This disconnect was brought into sharp relief thanks to new research from GumGum.
It found that nearly 43 per cent of consumers were not interested in receiving personalised ads at all. Nearly 70 per cent said that identity-based advertising was “invasive or unsettling” and more than half of Australian consumers said that they would stop using a brand’s services if they felt an ad was invasive or too personal.
When much of the industry is working to get its head around personalisation at scale, these findings could potentially serve as a reminder that just because you can, it doesn’t mean that you should.
“We’re so attuned to advertising that we don’t as an industry represent the everyday consumer. Research pieces like this are important because they’re a pulse check—are we getting it right? For the most part, it does reaffirm some of our assumptions but there are some interesting insights,” said Coote.
GumGum, of course, is a player in the contextual advertising space, which sees webpages analysed for their content before displaying an ad to a customer, rather than analysing a customer’s behaviour and serving an ad to them. Contextual advertising is often seen as a more privacy-preserving form of digital ad targeting.
Giving the example of a haircare brand looking to reach customers over the course of a week, Coote explained that contextual advertising could reach customers when they are considering salon options, rather than showing them ads for hair care products after they have visited the salon.
“It’s a win for the hair care brand because they know they’re serving a relevant ad in the right time at the right mindset. And then it’s a win for the consumer because it’s actually something relevant to them,” said Coote.
“66 per cent of people are actively trying to not get served ads through ad blockers, refusing cookies, etc. Contextual gives you a new way to reach the right audience at the right time that is relevant. There’s a balance between in the industry between what is relevant and what is scaled personalisation. I heard contextual described the other day as relevance but without surveillance,” added Coote.
“Personalisation at scale can still be achieved but we need to have a think about how we can achieve it. A lot of the legacy systems out there at the moment from large brands and large corporations have been built on identity and cookies. This research shows that they [consumers] don’t like that. They’re going to stop using your brand.”
There should also be benefits in attention using contextual advertising, according to GumGum’s research. Nearly two-thirds of non-neutral respondents said that they would pay more attention to contextually relevant ads. Meanwhile, 70 per cent of non-neutral respondents said that contextually relevant ads seemed more trustworthy.
At a time when trust seems to be harder to come by online, perhaps contextual advertising could be a path to explore. From a brand safety perspective, are publishers becoming more attractive than social platforms?
“I’ve always believed that brand safety is a key pillar of building a partnership. We’re currently using contextual technology to be able to identify is an article or video brand safe for a client. I see value in that and I’d like to think that that brands see value in that. If we can play that role in supporting their marketing objectives through a brand safe approach, sign me up,” said Coote.
