Contextual data vendors are making a play for political ad budgets with a pair of buzz words: signal loss.
Rohan Castelino, of video-level contextual data vendor IRIS.TV, put it succinctly: “To overcome signal loss, you need additional like signals.” But what exactly is signal loss?
“As you expand beyond mobile and your laptop, you have a lot of loss of signal when it comes to connected TV and streaming,” Castelino explained, pointing to a Truthset study from last year that looked at email data from 15 brokers and found postal address matches were only right 51 percent of the time. “That’s why the contextual data really starts coming [in] to boost it because now you’re finding a more relevant moment to reach somebody as opposed to just blasting them with ads.”
Castelino’s company offers ad buyers data that they can layer into their targeting to reach voters on the biggest screen in their house while they’re watching ad-supported streaming content. Imagine a group placing a pro-life ad during religious content, or a group pushing back against a junk food crackdown during a cooking show.
“You’ve got to win hearts and minds when people are most engaged,” said Castelino, the company’s CMO. “[We’ve] tested political ads … and there was [an increased] reaction and a passionate interest if those political ads were contextually or emotionally aligned with the content.”
This content alignment could also help campaigns reach voters more effectively because, well, 2024 is a ‘vibes’ election. “There’s just so much more opportunity to use the precision of programmatic with boosting signals that kind of align to how people feel,” Castelino added.
Now, while IRIS.TV says it can work with all ad budgets, Castelino said that insights are optimized around spends targeting 2-5 million impressions. “Contextual is not like the old days where it was basically you saw an ad for Dell computers on a blog for computers,” he said.
“You’re now at a stage where you can really understand what the shows and programs are about, and that’s kind of a game changer.”
