Reaching Relevant Audiences During the Super Bowl

This year’s Super Bowl may feel different than other years. However, with Tom Brady returning to the big game on a new team to face off against the defending champions, the Kansas City Chiefs, it feels like some things remain the same. While we still expect to be dazzled with big-budget ads, many major brands have pivoted their advertising strategy for this year’s game.

This isn’t entirely new. A number of advertisers have found digital to be the best way to reach their audiences during the game. After all, advertising is all about delivering the right message to the right person at the right time. With the resurgence in technologies like contextual targeting, advertisers can serve relevant ads alongside content that is engaging to users. Given the deprecation of cookies and third-party tracking, contextual targeting should be a part of every advertiser’s playbook.

Activating DV’s Custom Contextual Solution

DV’s Custom Contextual solution offers advertisers a powerful and simple way to activate contextually relevant reach at scale. For seasonal pushes — such as the Super Bowl — our solution can activate campaigns quickly and efficiently, requiring much less set up and maintenance than other contextual targeting solutions that rely more on keywords to power their targeting.

Instead of using keyword-driven technology to determine the meaning of the content, DV uses the same semantic science engine at the core of our industry-leading brand safety and suitability solution. DV can classify content dynamically and with enough nuance to tell separate concepts apart. For example, “salsa dancing” and “best Super Bowl salsas” would be classified into different categories. More importantly, DV’s contextual targeting segments can be built quickly and easily,  with just a few category selections.

Building a Super Bowl Targeting Profile

Whether you’re looking to raise awareness or drive conversions, building a comprehensive Custom Contextual segment for the Super Bowl — or any seasonal push — is as simple as selecting a few of our Custom Contextual categories. Advertisers can choose from a number of standard “off-the-shelf” categories to build a solid foundation for their targeting profile:

• Seasonal Category: Super Bowl – This category includes all content related to the Super Bowl — from game previews to articles with hosting tips for Super Bowl parties and more.
• In-Market Category: Sports – This category includes all sports-related content that’s associated with purchase intent, which is a great way to leverage the big game to push sales. Content in this category includes everything from listicles on “Super Bowl party essentials” to “Super Bowl-themed recipes.”
• IAB Category: Football – Including IAB content surrounding football is a good way to ensure reach on all football-related content.

These categories can help build a solid baseline that ensures contextually relevant reach. For more granular or unique campaign goals, we also offer dynamic categories. Dynamic categories are bespoke categories built with assistance from our content classification experts to meet these granular or unique targeting needs. For instance, a food brand that wants to specifically target Super Bowl-themed food content instead of Super Bowl content at large can leverage our dynamic categories to do so.  We also have a supplementary set of targeting tools such as URL keywords and inclusion/exclusion lists that further increase scale and precision.

A Solution with Proven Results

DV has helped a number of brands meet or exceed their campaign goals. For example, by using DV’s Custom Contextual targeting, a global tech brand was able to lower their cost-per-engagement (CPE) by 42%.

To learn more about the resurgence of contextual targeting and its value in a privacy-centric ecosystem, click here. If you’re interested in DV’s Custom Contextual solution, click here to reach out to our team.