The 22nd Edition of FIFA World Cup 2022 is about to begin soon. The World Cup stimulates a frenzy of marketing activities – both official and unofficial. It is about to kick off before Black Friday, and with the final seven days before Christmas, making the market more challenging but unique for the advertisers, and marketers.

Qatar World Cup Audience is Projected at 5 Billion this year. According to the official broadcast coverage of the 2018 World Cup, a combined 3.572 billion viewers – more than half of the global population aged four and over – tuned in to world football’s ultimate competition. One of the biggest sporting events in terms of viewers is a unique and great opportunity for advertisers to connect with the audience and make an impact.

The key to connecting with the audience during game time is to understand how they engage with the content, and who they listen to. Here we have highlighted best practices for you to meet your goals.

This World Cup Win Hearts and Minds of the Consumers

Research from Trends shows that brands need to show diversity, promote gender equality, take a stand on social issues, and show sustainability in their ads if they are to win the hearts and minds of their target audience. The research also found that leveraging high-attention premium publishers during the tournament will be a key highlight for advertisers, as fans go check the scores online (71 percent), while some read online articles about the matches (51 percent).

This will be a huge opportunity for the brand as billions of people intend to follow the game. It is always a massive draw for the brands as the consumers are stuck to their screens in the hope that football will, once again, or this time come home.

Some Interesting statistics to see:

• 65 percent of football fans believe that sponsors/ partners of the World Cup to have a business model that supports sustainability.
• 75 percent of UK consumers intend to watch football at home which means for FMCG brands these consumers will buy alcohol (65 percent), and snacks (65 percent) to see them through the game.
• Qatar 2022 will be the first World Cup which will take place in an Arab nation.
• In the year 2018, the sporting event added an estimated $2.4 billion to the global advertising market
• Around two-thirds of the World Cup’s market value comes from Europe.

A Tip for Marketers: Go Beyond Core Football Fans

There is no denying that the appeal of World Cup goes well beyond hardcore football fans. Considering this, advertisers are advised to develop creative that speaks to a broader audience to stand out from the wild competition.

Take a Bet on ‘Crunch Time’

More and more viewers are consuming football content on YouTube. Football-related searches on Youtube increased to 80% since Euro 2020. More searches mean more viewing. And after years of not being able to watch sports in person, there is definitely an adrenalin rush among people to go back to the stadium to watch the match live.

How to Connect with Fans While They Are Online?

In today’s time, it’s tough to imagine a world without the Internet. As of 2022, 69% of the world’s population, or 4.9 billion people, actively uses the internet. 

Marketing is and will always be referred to as reaching customers where they are. TV commercials, print advertisements, and billboards are all attempts to do that. Nearly every business benefits from an online presence. 

The key is to reach customers – and potential customers – in their right frame of mind. With more and more consumers shopping and researching products online, it’s become critical for companies to recognize the importance of contextual advertising. Considering that over 4.9 billion people are on the Internet, it’s a great opportunity for agencies to reach leads that are looking for their business.

The question is in the crowded space of the Internet, how are agencies and advertisers supposed to outshine their competitors? 

That’s where Mirrors by Silverpush comes in. 

What is Mirrors?

With user privacy gaining importance, advertisers must find a solution that does not intrude on users’ privacy. Mirrors is a platform that targets contextually by leveraging AI-powered human-augmented technology. Mirrors also ensure content-aligned ad placement as well as 100% brand safety and suitability, which is unique to each brand.

What are the Platforms on Which Mirrors Work?

Programmatic

• YouTube
• Non-YouTube Videos
• Display (Web pages and Apps)

Social 

• Facebook
• Instagram

What are the Pillars for Mirrors by Silverpush?

The four basic pillars and processes for Mirrors are as follows –

1. Contextual Targeting

Custom targeting & exclusion themes are defined for each campaign, based on brand objectives and specific KPIs. 

2. Brand Suitability

A dedicated team identifies in-video contexts basis defined inclusion/exclusion themes and accurately classifies content at video level into relevant buckets including unsafe content. 

The platform further analyses human-classified content, enabling more granular buckets – for instance, video content featuring multiple contexts. 

3. Custom Contextual Creatives

Video or channels’ performance metrics, safety assessment, engagement levels, organic influence, and growth momentum. 

4. Final Ad placement

Ad is finally placed across relevant, brand suitable, and high-performing content. 

How Does Mirrors Work?

Mirrors work by identifying celebrities, brands, objects, places, actions, on-screen text, and audio for precise targeting. It is explained below how it works on various platforms:

Mirrors for YouTube

Video has taken center stage as 95% of an ad message is retained by video while only 10% is in the text. Moreover, 73% of users agreed that contextual ad complements the video experience, compared to 55% at channel level & 47% at audience level targeting. 

Thus, Mirrors for YouTube identifies faces, brands, objects, places, actions, on-screen text, and audio sentiment to serve ads in line with video content, that users are actively engaging with. Our human-augmented AI technology accurately identifies harmful contexts across categories including nudity, hate speech, smoking, alcohol, violence, and more. It intelligently blocks only unsafe ad placements without over-blocking or killing reach.  

Click Here to see the demo for Mirrors.

Mirrors for Social

During the second quarter of 2022, Meta has stated that 3.65 billion people were using its core products (Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, or Messenger) each month. With roughly 2.93 billion monthly active users in 2022, Facebook is one of the most used online social networks worldwide. Mirrors on Social works in the following way –

• A relevant brand-safe page has been selected and processed to derive contextual signals, interest, etc. using AI & ML, and NLP models. 
• Then, relevant ads are targeted based on the signals.

Mirrors for OpenWeb

Advertisers and brands can unlock the full context and contextually target the most relevant and suitable text, image, and video content.

• Mirrors AI technology analyzes the complete content like Videos, Text, & Images to create contextual content buckets. 
• The AI technology then places video ads in the relevant content pages & OTT videos – in-stream and out-stream. 

Why Should You Choose Mirrors?

Traditional methods of keywords and affinity based targeting without context can lead to ad waste. Mirrors is a platform that is devoid of these problems. 

• Minimize Ad wastage
• Higher effective ROI
• Enhanced user experience 
• Positive brand recall

How to Reach Us?

To learn more about us and our products, you may call us or follow us on LinkedIn or Facebook for detailed insights. 

Are you using digital video advertising as part of your marketing strategy? Because your competitors certainly are! 

Every day, viewers viewed over 1 billion hours of video on YouTube, according to the company. Nowadays, browsing the internet is just like viewing a never-ending cycle of videos.

The modern web is now driven by video in ways that did not seem possible even 15 years ago, owing largely to the pervasiveness of personal mobile devices and ubiquitous, dependable high-speed internet connections.

Digital strategists are using an incredible quantity of video content for their insatiable audience to consume at will on all sorts of websites, from social platforms to news organizations to corporate pages.

We’ve made a lot of progress since the late 2000s when the only place to watch videos on the internet was YouTube.

However, there are now several sites where the audience can view videos. Snapchat is one of the fastest-growing social media platforms, thanks partly to its video stories, and Instagram has seen success by adopting a similar feature on its site.

According to research, over 86% of organizations used videos for marketing in 2021. Video advertising may increase your brand’s online exposure in search results, social media, and elsewhere on the internet.

Top 5 Reasons Why Video Advertising is Going to Dominate the Next Decade

Whether you open your laptop, unlock your phone, or turn on your smart TV, you can’t avoid video content, so embrace it. ‘Digital video advertising will rule the next decade,’ they predict. Read the top 5 reasons listed below to know why.

Online Content is Driven by Videos

It is evident that video dominates internet traffic, with video expected to account for 82 percent of worldwide internet traffic by 2022. Every month, 85 percent of internet users watch at least one online video, and 54 percent want to see more video content from their favorite brands and organizations. This is a large market of content-seeking consumers, so it’s no wonder that 87 percent of marketing professionals utilize video advertising.

High Engagement is from Video Advertising

Video content has no competition in terms of social media engagement. When compared to photo postings, video posts had 135 percent more organic reach on Facebook. Similarly, video postings on Instagram received twice as much interaction as images. The more your involvement, the more eyeballs will be drawn to your goods. You’ll have the highest chance of reaching the most influential audience if you use video content.

Sales are Boosted by Video Advertising

According to a recent consumer survey, 84 percent of people were driven to buy a product or service after seeing a video. Prioritizing video marketing will enhance brand recognition and pay dividends in the long run. 73 percent of customers say a brand’s social media presence affected their shopping decisions, while 84 percent said a brand’s video influenced their decision to buy a specific product. Clearly, video advertising is profitable, since 88% of video marketers are pleased with the ROI of their social media initiatives.

Video Advertising doesn’t have to Be Expensive

Many business owners still associate video advertising with television, where a single ad might cost thousands of dollars.

Because of the internet’s convenience, video advertising does not require nearly as much financial commitment as it once did. User-generated content may be your best choice if you’re searching for an inexpensive approach to leverage video advertising to develop a personal connection with your audience.

The most important thing to remember when using video is that you are achieving your marketing objectives. Whether it’s increasing your social media following, communicating with existing consumers, or increasing sales, video content may be a great weapon in your marketing arsenal.

Videos can be Shared

One of the most appealing aspects of video content, particularly on social media, is how easily it can be shared. Text and photos are shared 12 times more than social video. Video content is shared by 92 percent of mobile video viewers, and videos are six times more likely to be retweeted than images, according to Twitter.

Digital Video Advertising is Growing

Video advertising is one of the most popular forms of advertising nowadays. Digital video advertising is anticipated to reach $20.1 billion in 2022, with expenditure on video commercials reaching $9.26 billion by 2024. Companies have discovered that retraining customers to accept and even anticipate video at every step may have several benefits.

Because video has become such a natural part of the web surfing experience, advertisers can utilize it to instantly engage their audience as if it were something they had intentionally sought out.

In today’s world, it is not an easy task to grab attention of consumers. Besides their own personal tasks, they are surrounded by a lot of content on their smartphones. They tend to focus on only the content that interests them, ignoring other content posts.

So, if an unrelated ad appears in front of a person watching a cricket match, he is definitely going to get irritated and angry. He would question why such an ad is being shown, which is totally out of context of what he is currently watching.

Consumers’ tolerance for irrelevant ads is decreasing at a fast rate and so is the return on investment for those marketers that show such ads. As some of the web browsers have phased out third-party cookies and Chrome is going to do this in future, the third-party party- based ads that follow consumers from one website to other and irritates them, are destined to come to an end.

Contextual Advertising is the Solution

Contextual advertising serves ads that match with the content being consumed. This makes them highly non-interruptive and non-irritating to consumers. By serving contextually relevant ads, brands boost engagement with audiences and increases the chances of conversion.

A research survey was conducted in which eighteen hundred consumers based in the United Kingdom took part. The survey considered different types of interest categories, namely – beauty, automotive, and food and drink. On the basis of the ad targeting strategy deployed, the survey participants were grouped into four classes, viz. – contextual targeting, no targeting, demographic-based targeting, and interest-based targeting.

The survey found that participants under the contextual targeting group showed two and a half times more interest. Participants who viewed contextually relevant ads had a thirty-two percent more chance to act in comparison to those participants who were grouped under demographic-based targeting.

The research survey shows that contextual targeting not only helps in triggering a sale, but also arouses a positive feeling of receptivity regarding the interest category among consumers. Contextual ad targeting also makes people positively disposed to ads.

Contextually placed ads drive sale of niche goods. When consumers are consuming niche content along with contextually relevant ads, then their chances to buy niche products increases significantly. By using the contextual approach to digital advertising, marketers are able to reach even previously unidentified audiences.

As consumers are paying more attention to the quality of ads that they are served with, the traditional random ad targeting cannot meet the purpose. The only way for marketers to serve ads that are non-irritating and attention-grabbing is to resort to contextual advertising. 

News related to data privacy violations by major organizations in the world like Google, Zoom, and Facebook has made headlines several times now.

The third-party tracking and monitoring of data online, much of it because of data aggregation, profiling, and selective targeting has become a major issue for users. 

This has led to various data privacy laws being passed by government institutions all over the world. 

Majorly it was the 2020s that brought a significant transformation in the advertising industry. 

The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) entered into effect on January 1, 2018, two years after the European Union passed the GDPR to address consumer concerns about access to personal data.

This left brands, ad tech vendors, and publishers scrambling to figure out what they need to do to comply with these regulations. 

Then, just after a couple of weeks, Google announced that its Chrome web browser, walking on similar roads by Safari and Firefox, would eliminate cookies by January 2022. 

The matter remains, what is the reason for this major upheaval? 

It’s the need for privacy of personal data, of course! 

What do you Understand by Personal Data?

The main motive behind GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) is personal data. However, many organizations are still unaware of what “personal data” actually means which makes it necessary to define it.

Any information that clearly identifies a single individual is defined as personal data. According to the GDPR, information is considered personal data when an individual can be identified, directly or indirectly, “by reference to an identifier such as a name, an identification number, an online identifier, location data, or one or more factors specific to that natural person’s physical, physiological, mental, economic, genetic, cultural, or social identity.”

That is a lot of information. In some cases, an individual’s IP address, hair color, employment, or political beliefs may be considered personal data.

To clarify, personal data includes:

1. Dates of birth, Social Security numbers, phone numbers, and email addresses are examples of biographical information or current living situations.
2. Looks, appearance, and behavior, such as eye color, weight, and personality attributes
3. Data and information concerning education in the workplace, such as pay, tax information, and student statistics.
4. Religion, political viewpoints, and geo-tracking data are examples of private and subjective data.
5. Health, illness, and genetics, including medical history, genetic data, and sick leave information

Contextual Plays a Key Role in the Future of Digital Advertising

The need for connecting with people and delivering ads without relying on personal data has forced the advertisers to reimagine a futureproof modern solution to help brands win in a cookie-less world.

Contextual targeting has proved to be that solution. 

The COVID-19 times has also been a difficult time for advertisers as they needed to protect their ads from being displayed on content related to coronavirus-related content. 

These are some of the reasons why contextual targeting is getting a strong second look.

How Contextual Targeting can Solve the Privacy Issue?

Despite the fact that behavioral targeting offers various advantages, such as a greater click-through rate and conversion rate. However, all of this by putting consumers’ privacy at risk. This is something that must not be overlooked.

As brands, ad tech companies, and publishers plan for the next generation of digital advertising, the knowledge provided by contextual targeting is gaining traction, owing to the fact that it depends directly on the text, photographs, and videos currently present on the page of content being consumed.

It claims to deliver the right ad, to the right person, at the right moment, and does it diligently. It focuses on the visual elements of web sites, employing proprietary computer vision technology to collect visual aspects and couple them with text to give critical insights into the context in which businesses advertise.

Contextual intelligence is equally as powerful as third-party data when paired with the first-party data that marketers and publishers already have. Furthermore, brand safety is a result of contextual targeting.

Conclusion

One of the most difficult challenges is getting businesses, ad tech firms, and publishers on the same page in order to prepare for a cookie-free future. Many marketers continue to work the old way, believing that 2022 is further away than it is, just because they need the income, especially now.

Contextual with brand safety and a proper knowledge of pictures and content at the page level will open up the internet and provide additional advertising chances for publishers and newspapers with exceptional content—including hard news, which is frequently barred wholesale.