The ever-brightening spotlight being shined on contextual targeting in our industry right now is understandable, especially in light of the growing urgency to safeguard marketing investments against the loss of third-party cookies and other long-established audience identifiers. That said, contextual represents a fast-moving and dynamic space that warrants a deeper understanding to leverage it to its utmost potential.

So which emerging contextual capabilities will drive the greatest benefits for advertisers and publishers in the near future? Let’s look at a few forthcoming enhancements that the industry should be watching.

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Granular Brand Safety and Suitability Understanding

Brand safety and suitability remain paramount for advertisers in today’s ever-fragmenting digital marketplace. A tremendous part of success with contextual targeting involves knowing where you want your brand to appear—and where you don’t. That said, when advertisers paint with too broad a brush in this regard, it can lead to lost opportunity and scale. Such is the case, for example, when premium news platforms are stricken from advertising plans based on the possibility that an ad could run against a news story on a controversial or otherwise brand-inappropriate topic.

Fortunately for advertisers, content-level brand safety and suitability analytics continue to improve when it comes to granularity, enabling advertisers to target inventory on a given domain with great precision. Particularly on the open web, advertisers now have far greater transparency not just into where their ads should be running but also where they actually did run. This enables continuous improvement in targeting as it relates to brand suitability and safety.

Improved Publisher Understanding and Control

Greater contextual granularity and transparency aren’t just boons to advertisers; they’re game-changers for publishers as well. Emerging sell-side contextual solutions are empowering publishers with a deeper understanding of their own content as it relates to brand safety and suitability, putting them in a better position to make monetization decisions. By being able to proactively turn off monetization on potentially problematic content, publishers can avoid ending up on wholesale block lists due to the small percentage of content they publish that might not be suitable for advertising for any given reason.

Better-Informed Creative Optimization

Another welcome emerging enhancement in the contextual space has to do with what’s possible on the optimization front. Rather than focusing performance evaluation on the inventory around which a campaign appeared, advertisers and publishers can now dig deeper into creative analytics on both sides. This is accomplished by looking at actualized campaign data that shows not just where ads ran and how they performed but also which creatives were run, which landing pages were featured, and other core campaign elements that can be optimized based on outcome data.

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Enhanced CTV Analysis

Finally, another emerging opportunity that advertisers and publishers should be watching is the ability to apply contextual targeting and brand safety protections to CTV environments at scale. This is now beginning to happen on a detailed content level versus just basic metadata. By tapping into solutions that analyze the entire body of the content, both visual and audio, brands can ensure their CTV budgets are being deployed safely, appropriately, and effectively.

For many advertisers, the power and capabilities of contextual are familiar, given that it predates many of the digital audience targeting tactics that are now disappearing from the landscape. As we look to the future of marketing, however, we must be careful not to confuse contextual’s longevity with dormancy. There’s nothing “legacy” about today’s contextual targeting. In fact, the pace of enhancement within the space has never been faster. Staying abreast of what’s possible will be key to optimizing ad performance in a cookieless and fragmented identity landscape.