How Contextual Targeting Impacts Programmatic and Indirect Sales
The buzz around contextual targeting is ramping up in the online advertising world, with the promise that it will solve issues surrounding privacy, transparency, and more. But where is its impact registering in the ad-supported streaming ecosystem? TVREV’s Alan Wolk, Fremantle’s Laura Florence, Philo’s Aulden Kaye Yi, Roku’s Charlie Goodman, and Vevo’s Melissa Sofo offer their perspectives in a clip from the latest Streaming Media Connect 2025.
Varying Levels of Platform Readiness
TVREV Co-Founder and Lead Analyst Alan Wolk begins the conversation by reminding the panelists that contextual targeting is “the big buzzword these days” because it can address privacy and transparency issues. “How is that—pro or con—affecting programmatic and indirect sales?” he asks. “Are you actually seeing it, or is it just sort of a thing that people are talking about a lot, and it … hasn’t really made its way down into the trenches yet?”
Fremantle SVP of Global Channels Laura Florence notes that the effectiveness of contextual advertising varies across platforms. “[S]ome platforms have really good contextual advertising, and their CPMs and their fill rates reflect that, whereas others don’t necessarily have that same capability,” she explains. Fremantle has “a really good balance of where we can authenticate our audience and then do audience mapping off of that with contextual; we can provide that whole end-to-end journey.”
Florence brings up what she sees as the main issue: “It’s just [that] not every platform has contextual mechanics that also scale and are the same. And listen, it makes sense, right? Some of these platforms are much older, some of them are legacy broadcasters that are coming into this and trying to adapt all their systems, versus Roku or others that are newer, that are much more apt and ready for this.”
Genre as Choose-Your-Own-Adventure
Philo Head of Advertising Partnerships Aulden Kaye Yi is also wary of the lack of standardization in contextual targeting. She puts it in terms of taxonomy, noting that people have different concepts of genres. “[If] someone else has a different taxonomy that they’re passing, and then what does that mean to the buy side and what are they looking for?” That’s what Philo needs to be aware of. Yi wants better descriptions for TV content, adding that “a lot of the targeting is happening on the pub side [because] we will curate specific deals with genres, and less of that targeting, I would say, is happening on the demand side for that [lack of standardization] reason.”
“I totally agree,” Head of Supply Side Ad Platform at Roku Charlie Goodman says, jumping in to the conversation. If a customer wants to contextualize, Roku gives them the option to. But what he’s seeing with context is a genre free-for-all. “Genre, to Aulden’s point, is like choose your own adventure. I think women’s sports is a really great audience, [viewers are] highly engaged. I think just based on socioeconomics, [it’s] really great. But I weirdly have the genre of just ‘sports’ or I have it as ‘basketball,’ but there’s not really a way to message out that it’s valuable” as a categorization for fans of women’s sports, he gripes, because you’re not calling the genre, say, “Caitlin Clark.”
Goodman continues, “I think that we have to figure out as an industry how to surface that stuff so it actually makes sense because today it’s weirdly either too macro or it’s too micro. And I see requests that come in to our platform and there’s like 30 genres,” which is “weird. Why am I seeing a genre for kayaking? I don’t know. … [A]s a duty, if contextual is going to be a thing, it definitely needs to be standardized.”
How AI Can Help
Florence thinks AI can play a role in solving this problem. “I was having this argument—not an argument, a spirited discussion—with Andy Beach on Teams, because there is so much opportunity with AI metadata and where it’s applied,” she recalls. Foundationally, she says, the questions to be asked are: “What are we supposed to be providing? What should be coming through the ad server? What are we trying to connect to?” She continues, “Even for DVD, this was hard back in the day, right? Amazon has a thousand genres and subgenres, and then all of our mapping that has to go to it, and now we have all these new providers showing up all the time.”
In addition, Fremantle is getting requests from the ad side for improvement on the metadata fields. “[M]etadata in general, just to echo [the conversation so far], is the biggest opportunity, but is also the biggest challenge because there is no standardization,” Florence says. “But you need those personalization factors—and how do we provide those, right? I do think there’s AI tools that will figure some of this out, but it is definitely a huge area for focus.”
Summing Up
Wolk shares that TVREV just released a free report on contextual targeting. He acknowledges, “Contextual is more than just genre. That’s the thing. It’s emotion. You can start targeting on emotion, on music choices, the actors who are in the scene. If you’re Cadillac, and Matthew McConaughey is in a show, you can run an ad with him. So, it seems to have a lot of opportunity.” He adds, “But to your point, Laura, the metadata sucks because when they digitize all the TV shows, they didn’t bother to do that. They’re just like, ‘Seinfeld: comedy,’ ‘Friends: season three, episode two,’ and that was it. So AI is helping with that.”
Wolk encourages a participant who’s been quiet so far to chime in. Vevo VP of US Sales Melissa Sofo states that her content set is unique; Vevo has “15 different channels in different genres that span, so it’s a little bit more natural for us to be able to catalog our content in that respect. But certainly, we have proprietary data and tools utilizing AI to help do that so that we can provide conceptual advertising naturally to our clients.”
Wolk’s concludes the clip by describing a hypothetical situation he calls “left-handed juggler syndrome,” in which “brands come and they go to Google [and] they’re like, ‘Yeah, we want to reach left-handed jugglers.’ And Google’s like, ‘Great, yeah, we’ve got 200,000 of them.’ And then they come to Vevo and Melissa’s like, ‘Yeah, neither of them are watching this week.’” Compared to Google, Vevo’s audience pool is smaller, Wolk reiterates. He stresses the importance of advertisers figuring out the audience they want to reach.
Join us in May 2025 for more thought leadership, actionable insights, and lively debate at Streaming Media Connect.
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