Thought leadership

Thanks to Mantis pre-scan and ongoing monitoring, Mantis was able to flag these issues and open up more inventory for smarter, more effective advertising. Their approach allows them to target more opportunities while ensuring ad placements are safe, suitable and seen by the right audience.

Almost half (47%) of Super Bowl content produced by Reach titles between 29 December and 28 January was blocked from receiving advertising by keyword blocklists.

According to data shared with The Media Leader by Mantis, Reach’s brand safety and contextual advertising solution, keywords such as “victims”, “injuries”, “wounds” and “incident” were commonly flagged by standardised agency blocklists. Such keywords often end up on blocklists due to their association with violence, even though they are commonly used in the context of innocuous stories, such as sports.

“It is this nuance that sweeping keyword blocklists can’t take into account and ultimately leave advertisers cut off from inventory that could be safe, suitable and relevant for reaching the right audiences,” said Mantis managing director Fiona Salmon.

Last year, studies from Stagwell and Teads/Lumen revealed that ads placed adjacent to stories covering politics or crime performed just as effectively compared with those next to more positive stories. The findings called into question whether keyword blocklists make sense at all. Yet publishers have struggled for years with articles being demonetised due to advertisers’ fears of having ads next to controversial or unseemly content, especially coverage of politics or war.

In July, The Media Leader reported that half of Reach’s Euros coverage was blocked from advertising due to similarly overzealous blocklisting practices. Publishers also saw a negative impact on Olympics coverage because numerous advertisers still have “Paris” on blocklists following terror attacks that took place in 2015. Later in autumn, two-fifths of articles about Halloween were demonetised for similar reasons.

“While agencies have made some progress in reducing the size of keyword blocklists — and agency-wide blocklists may be reviewed relatively regularly, sometimes quarterly — the brand-specific ones are often left untouched for long periods,” Salmon told The Media Leader.

“In many cases, both lists are applied at the same time, which can create inconsistencies in how content is classified as safe.”

The consequences of missing out on Super Bowl-related articles not only occur for publishers, but for brands seeking engaged audiences. According to the NFL, last year’s game between the Kansas City Chiefs and San Francisco 49ers was watched by a combined total of 3.4m unique viewers across Sky Sports and ITV in the UK, up 48% from the year before. The championship has become especially popular among valuable younger demographics, with the 2024 Super Bowl seeing a 91% year-on-year growth in under-35 viewers.

“We are seeing increased popularity around Super Bowl viewing and this will have an impact on the number of publications and articles covering the event,” Salmon noted.

“Given the Super Bowl’s late-night broadcast in the UK, many people may prefer to catch up on the event’s outcomes the following morning,” she continued. “This anticipated interest presents an opportunity for UK news outlets to prepare timely and engaging content to meet this demand.”

The 2025 Super Bowl kicks off on Sunday at 11:30pm GMT. The Kansas City Chiefs are returning for the fifth time in six years, facing off for the second time against the Philadelphia Eagles.

Mantis’ latest analysis consisted of 416 Super Bowl-related articles from Reach’s publisher network. Mantis used Google’s BigQuery service to compare standardised agency keyword blocklists with its own natural language understanding and contextual targeting solutions.

Salmon said articles were classified based on keyword detection and context: green for safe, red for unsafe with high confidence and amber for potentially unsafe but below the blocking threshold.

She added: “There is an opportunity for agencies to access more inventory that is safe and suitable for brand advertising during the Super Bowl and future sporting events.”

What has had the biggest impact on brand safety in the last five years?

Covid and the pandemic have had the single largest impact on brand safety and how the advertising ecosystem views it. Firstly, because it was unknown. No industry or person had experienced anything like it before. It touched every part of our lives – sporting events, work life, our freedom to go out. Secondly, because it changed how people consumed content and shopped. Streaming services saw rapid growth and every single business, whether they were a national retailer or local bakery, had to pivot their offering to be online.

During this time, brands unsurprisingly worried about their ads being placed near news stories covering the negative impacts of the pandemic – but nearly every piece of content produced at that time made reference to covid. Putting keyphrases like ‘covid’ or ‘coronavirus’ on a blocklist would have cut brands off from a majority of news stories, many of which were completely brand suitable. This is when we began to see the conversation around brand suitability pick up steam and it was also the point I knew that we needed to rapidly develop our brand safety tech to tackle this issue.

How far do you think the advertising industry has come in shifting its attitudes to brand safety in the last five years?

With advertisers, not very far unfortunately. There’s not been a large shift away from the norm of very blunt brand safety keyword blocking and a large amount of caution remains. However, I think the industry is starting to understand the difference between safety and suitability, and this will be key.

Safety is no longer up for discussion – that’s table stakes. Slowly as an industry, we’re understanding that safety is a fixed thing – terrorism, weapons, and violence, for example, are always going to be a universal safety issue for brands. But the challenge is that this binary thinking has been mirrored onto the suitability piece as well. With suitability, there is some content that a brand would consider safe and suitable, but these articles have been blocked from advertisers due to blunt tools. A different brand however may consider that content unsafe and be happy to have it blocked. This lack of nuance or personalisation in these tools is severely impacting performance.

The Olympics highlighted this perfectly. If an athlete ‘bombed’ out, or a starter ‘pistol’ misfired, blunt safety tools would immediately block brands from appearing next to a perfectly brand safe story. One of the breakout stars of this year’s Games was Türkiye’s sharpshooter Yusuf Dikeç – but brands could have missed out on the viral moment because of the very sport he competed in being on a keyword blocklist. This has been exacerbated during the Paralympics, where over-cautious blocklists can isolate any articles that mention disabilities.

Publishers have been far more forward thinking however. More of them have adopted our technology, which is in turn generating the data to show advertisers that it's effective. But we have to move as a unit if these tools are to be effective and there needs to be more opt-in from the buy side.

What is your proudest achievement at Mantis so far?

Creating an environment during Covid where publishers could monetise their inventory in a safe way. A significant portion of news stories had, unsurprisingly, a word relating to covid in them – everything from hard-hitting reporting to news of local restaurants reopening and restrictions lifting. Being able to create a solution that stopped publishers from missing out on revenue opportunities and allowed brands to continue to effectively reach audiences was really powerful and I’m proud to have been part of that.

What has been the biggest challenge during your time at Mantis?

I think we’ve encountered the same problem most start-ups do – changing people’s minds. No one gets fired for hiring a well known business or a tool that has been in the market for a long time. So trying to shift perceptions and get people to test out our solution to see its positive impact has been a struggle at times. We’ve approached this by being as clear and transparent as possible, explaining how our solution works and why it is more effective than a simple keyword block list solution that you set up and then forget about.

As brand safety risks have evolved, how have you ensured that your solution is able to keep up?

Our solution is highly adaptable by design. It needs to be able to shift to the exact brand safety and suitability needs of each of our clients, so we are constantly updating it to keep up with the latest digital trends and potential safety issues. AI and machine learning have been key to this, constantly learning and constantly tweaking to ensure that any new nuances are taken into account.

Take for example Taylor Swift. She’s the biggest recording artist in the world, undertaking a record-breaking world tour, so advertising near related content has long been a no brainer. But when she had to cancel three shows earlier this year due to terror threats, her name may have found its way onto keyword blocklists as brands tried to avoid being next to articles around these events.

Brands cannot risk cutting themselves off from that level of reach – when many Taylor Swift articles remain brand suitable – and so our solutions are updated to ensure that advertisers could successfully navigate these events and continue to reach Taylor Swift fans in a safe and suitable way.

What role does AI play in both brand safety risks and solutions?

There is no doubt that the ever-spreading use of AI, especially generative AI, could cause brand safety issues. Already we’re seeing incredibly life-like deep fakes videos, images, and audio perforating online.

But AI is also the answer to this problem. By using tools that can better understand the nuance of content and rapidly evolve to emergent threats, marketers can tackle these new problems as they arise.

Where would you like the conversation around brand safety to be five years from now?

I’d like brands to start approaching their ad buying with the mindset of suitability, not what is or isn’t safe. As I said before, safety is not up for question at this point, but the suitability piece is what we’re really after and what I believe all sides of the ecosystem want. Unfortunately, until now the tools haven’t been available for this shift. But now we have them I want to start having suitability conversations rather than safety ones.

Making this shift happen is a different thing altogether but I believe it will happen if advertisers just start testing suitability tools and having more conversations within the industry around safety. We need to make this change swiftly and ideally within the next two years. 

The internet has, for a long time now, been where cutting edge trends – and cultures that evolve around them – are incubated and spread. While back in the 90s, this happened more slowly across disparate forums, as social media platforms have become more available and made us more connected, trends today spread like wildfire; creating new audiences, behaviours and slang.  For brands, keeping up with what's hot and what’s not can be the key to reaching younger audiences. Last summer, for example, saw every social feed and publication swamped by the cultural behemoth that was Barbie and brands were able to jump on the trend to cut through to audiences – from Pintrest’s Barbie boards to Tangle Teaser’s influencer-heavy Barbie campaign. This year “Brat Summer”, coined by singer Charlie XCX, has been trending in Google and Urban Dictionary searches, with brands leaning into its popularity, as seen by Kate Spade showcasing a “Brat Summer Starter Pack” on TikTok. While Barbie is a brand-led example and “Brat Summer” is a celebrity-led one, social platforms are also now where consumer-led, generational trends evolve, eventually feeding into the mainstream.

We might not currently be seeing premium publishers using words like “rizz” “sigma” or “skibidi” in articles other than those exploring the younger generations’ new terminology. But, as Gen Z flex their spending power, estimated to be over $450 billion globally, and the upcoming Gen Alpha start to standout as consumers in their own right – with an expected global economic footprint of $5.46tn (£4.32tn) by 2029 – the cultural semantics, evolving from social media, that impact them will need to be taken into account sooner rather than later.  

Out of the loop

Being able to rapidly pivot messaging and creative to jump onto the latest trend is one thing. But all efforts go to waste if brands’ ad campaigns don’t actually reach their target audience of outdated and imprecise keyword blocklists. On the whole, marketers are still deploying legacy brand safety tools that are unable to keep up with the latest fast moving trends and potential threats in online environments.

For an industry that is constantly looking toward The Next Big Thing, the reliance on keyword blocklists as a brand safety and suitability solution is head scratching. In today's fast-moving, context-rich and video-first online environments, these tools simply do not cut it. Not only that, but marketers often employ a ‘set up and sit back’ approach to these solutions, rarely updating them as events, trends and new slang words unfold across the web.

Every generation uses its own slang. Speaking to my 10-year-old (who now calls me “bruh”) can sometimes feel like speaking another language due to the phrases they’ve picked up from friends or the internet. These words shift and change meaning constantly, but they will likely become recognisable and used among a more mainstream audience. And brands must keep up with this if they are to keep reaching Gen Z and eventually younger demographics. There is no point crafting a perfectly calibrated campaign if your outdated blocklist cuts you off from reaching your target audience; as Gen Alpha might say, this is “skibidi ohio” (not good at all).

Take, for example, the colloquialisms that Gen Z often use online – words like ‘slay’, ‘lit, or ‘slaps’. All of these, in their traditional meaning, could find themselves on the blocklist of an over cautious brand. But to younger generations, these are all highly positive (trust me, I’ve Googled them) and could be appropriate to advertise against.

This is a problem not just for advertisers, but the whole ecosystem. It cuts off publishers from much needed revenue, stops brands being placed in premium locations, and gives customers a worse on-page ad experience. So what needs to happen to stop this cheugy (“the opposite of trendy”) state of affairs?

Getting with the times

Modern problems demand modern solutions. This is one of the major issues with blocklists – they are a legacy solution built for a different era of the internet.

For an indication of how much the landscape has changed, look no further than the rise of video – specifically short form video. Its spread online has been rapid, especially thanks to platforms such as TikTok and Instagram. This has been reflected in the continuing increase in video ad budgets by brands, with spend in this area seeing a 7.8% boost in the last quarter alone amongst UK advertisers.

While advertisers are right to worry about brand safety, the lack of nuance that blocklists offer is harming their ability to reach consumers, and ultimately their ROI. It’s time that marketers embraced solutions that were as agile and fast-evolving as the internet – and language – itself.

AI-powered brand safety solutions are able to more effectively read the context and sentiment of content, whether text, still image, audio, or video. These solutions are always evolving, with the constantly updating definitions of brand safety that can be rapidly tweaked in line with unfurling events and trends. Brands using these tools can ultimately continue to have a strong defence without cutting off potential ad slots.

At the same time, these solutions are underpinned by the guidelines outlined by the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM). This ensures standardised definitions around brand safety issues, as well as a shared language that all players can harness.

As one trend fizzles out, another springs into life. Keeping up with exactly what the latest fads are is hard enough personally, but for brands it can be the difference between reaching your audience, or being cut off by an imprecise keyword blocklist. Marketers must embrace forward-thinking solutions that can more effectively read the nuance and connotations of content if they are to truly maximise their ad spend.

Ten years from its inception, Amazon Prime Day continues to drive revenue across the retail landscape. With consumer spend increasing year-on-year during the event, competition for attention is fierce. It is critical that advertisers reach consumers with highly relevant products and offers at speed and scale, all the while prioritising brand safety and suitability. However, the greatest gains are to be made by those who can attract and retain consumers. For premium publishers, our data shows that AI-generated recommendations offer the potential to increase conversions by 37%, whilst still enhancing the user experience.

Link to full article here: https://advertisingweek.com/four-factors-for-success-during-prime-day-2024-and-beyond/

With ongoing back and forth on a decision, this announcement isn't a complete surprise and we know many will be glad to delay change a little longer, to ensure enhanced privacy measures are fit for purpose and not rushed.

Despite some specifics remaining uncertain, Google’s update does not alter the direction of travel towards a more privacy-conscious landscape, something Mantis is well-prepared for, thanks to our signed-in users and established IDs. Advertisers must continue their trajectories towards a cookieless future – or at least, one where their impact is diminished.

With regulatory bodies such as the ICO still discussing the unsuitability of cookies, and with the exact nature of Google’s Privacy Sandbox remaining unclear, let’s not discount another twist in the cookie saga. This latest development benefits the ecosystem by preventing the implementation of inadequate solutions (like FLoC, FLEDGE or Topics), and enabling meaningful conversations with advertisers about embedding contextual advertising and its performance advantages.

Continuing to implement contextual tools and first party data strategies should be an ongoing priority for advertisers looking to reach their target audiences in an effective way.

View the full article here: https://www.exchangewire.com/blog/2024/07/24/cookie-deprecation-is-dead-what-should-the-industry-do-now/

Nearly half (45%) of Euro 2024 final coverage across Reach publications was blocked from receiving advertising, having been wrongfully deemed “not brand safe”.

That is according to Mantis, a brand-safety and contextual ad solutions provider initially launched as part of Reach in 2019.

Mantis found that brands opting to keyword-block terms like “shot”, “shoot”, “shoot-out” and “attack” — likely to avoid having ads placed against news reports of violent conflicts — missed out on advertising against Euro football matches and negatively impacted publisher revenues.

It similarly found that 56% of Reach articles published around England’s semi-final match against the Netherlands were also blocked by advertisers using such keywords. According to Mantis, this amounted to 174 brands blocking those pages from advertising.

Mantis was unable to immediately provide an estimate of how much Reach lost out on by having a large proportion of its articles blocked, citing a longer turnaround for analysing the downstream business impacts.

“It is worryingly common when brands rely on a blanket blocklist of keywords in the attempt to deliver brand-safe advertising,” Mantis managing director Fiona Salmon told The Media Leader.

“While there is a need for brands to actively avoid association with potentially controversial or damaging articles, the keyword blocklist approach frequently results in inventory that is contextually relevant, and safe, being blocked. This not only negatively impacts publisher revenue, but also reduces brand exposure to target audiences reading suitable and safe content.”

Salmon called the issue of keyword-blocking “particularly prevalent” with sports reporting because of the common overlap of language used in sport and in more controversial stories.

Other keywords commonly blocked in relation to sport coverage include “crashed” and “crashing”, in reference to a team exiting a tournament; “attack”, “attacker” and “attacking”; “disastrous” as in a poor performance; and “steal” as in stealing the ball or stealing the show.

In an interview with The Media Leader earlier this year, World Media Group CEO Jamie Credland singled out keyword-blocking as the most significant problem facing publishers even in an era of uncertainty brought by developments in generative AI and changes to audience acquisition via search and social media.

“The biggest challenge is advertisers or marketers who are shying away from election or war coverage, who are perhaps using keyword blocklists in an indiscriminate way and may not even be aware of it,” Credland said.

He added that the problem is not new but has worsened over time, with brands and media agencies increasingly erring on the side of caution out of fear of sparking controversy and backlash.

Olympics another opportunity
The upcoming Olympic Games, which begin in Paris on 26 July, offer another opportunity for brands to advertise against high-traffic sport content.

However, Salmon warned that publishers “are already experiencing a huge impact on Olympics content” because many advertisers “inexplicably” still have “Paris” placed on blocklists because of the 2015 ISIL terrorist attacks in the French capital.

“There must be a more serious overhaul of brand-safety solutions if advertisers, brands and agencies are to stop missing out on inventory that is both safe and contextually relevant,” she said, adding that blocklists’ “lack of nuance and agility are seriously hurting publishers too”.

As Euro 2024 rapidly approaches its climax and tensions rise with England set to meet Spain in the final this weekend, we can reflect on a number of standout performances from individual players, stunning comebacks, well-drilled teams and innovative brands. 

It's certainly been a tournament to remember for a number of reasons; not least of these is the number of own goals. With the tally currently standing at 10, we are only one short of the all-time record of 11 set at Euro 2020. 

The most calamitous own goal of all, though, may have been notched up by the advertising industry. Following England’s semi-final showdown against the Netherlands, new Mantis data reveals 56% of Reach articles published around the match would have been blocked by advertisers using keywords ‘shot’, ‘shoot’ and ‘attack’. The result? A missed opportunity for the 174 brands blocking those pages and a negative impact on published revenue. 

Blanket blocklists don't guarantee brand safety

With a bumper summer of sport – the Euros, Wimbledon, the Olympics – already underway, many consumers are searching for sports-related content from trusted sources such as premium publishers. Ahead of Sunday's football final, millions will be searching for stats, analysis, previews and other content as they seek to enhance their enjoyment of what has been an absorbing and enthralling tournament. 

But brands using blanket blocklists are missing out on inventory that is not just perfectly safe, but also contextually relevant. And for those that include football fans among their target audiences, turning down the opportunity to connect with consumers in such an environment just doesn’t make sense. While the headlines around penalty shootouts, France's misfiring attack and Scotland crashing out of the tournament have brought this issue into sharp focus, it highlights a wider problem that, still, needs to be addressed if brands want to make their own comeback.  

It’s not all about football

The recent General Election is another case in point. Many reports have included words such as 'disastrous', for example, a term that commonly appears on ad blocklists. Looking further back, the Covid pandemic and Black Lives Matter protests highlighted issues with overzealous tools and extensive keyword blocklists. But it seems some brands, frustratingly for publishers, haven't updated their blocklist strategy; our data shows that leading supermarkets are still regularly missing out on brand-safe advertising inventory, by including phrases such as ‘supermarket’ and ‘bleach’ in their blocklists.

Brand safety is rightly a concern for marketers that don't want their company or products associated with controversial and contentious subject matters. But their default keyword blocklists don't recognise nuance. 

In today’s fast moving online landscape, these tools are no longer fit for purpose. The 'if in doubt, leave it out' approach can reduce the reach of advertising and see premium publishers missing out on revenue and the chance to serve highly relevant ads to their hard-won audience. Adding further salt to the wound is the fact that the high quality of content on these sites is likely to boast increased user dwell time and engagement, making the blanket blocklist approach even more wasteful. 

It's time for advertisers to update their playbook and address brand safety in a different way. While they still need a strong defence in place, they need a strategy that can take advantage of every chance to reach their audience in premium, relevant environments. 

This involves adopting solutions that don't rely heavily on blocklists, but that actually understand the true context and sentiment of any webpage, rapidly and at scale. Using the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) guidelines as a basis, brands can harness tools that allow them to more effectively place their ads in high quality and contextually appropriate locations. 

We at Mantis have seen this in action. Brands using Mantis brand safety and contextual targeting in the Euros in our platform have achieved up to a 724% increase on their usual CTRs, by eliminating a blanket blocklist of phrases such as “killing”. This has opened up advertising inventory on safe, premium content, including this article in the Mirror titled: “England fans single out Three Lions star for 'killing them' during Switzerland clash”.

They think it's all over

We might be about to call full-time on Euro 2024 and Wimbledon, but there's still plenty more sport to come this summer. As we look towards the Summer Olympics, with reporters covering up to 32 sports across the event, there is the real opportunity for advertisers and publishers to take advantage of the increased traffic to premium news sites during this time. However, with the keyword Paris remaining on blocklists following the 2015 bombings in the city, it is already having a huge impact on Olympics content, highlighting the need for quick action. Brands that want to retain their cutting edge and publishers seeking to maximise revenues need to show legacy blocklists the red card. Instead, they must make solutions that genuinely understand the nuance and context of a webpage their star player.

Sport, in one form or another, will be almost inescapable this summer. While one-off tournaments such as the UEFA European Championships and the Paris Olympics are the headline-grabbing events, there truly is something for everyone.

From Wimbledon to the T20 Cricket World Cup and the Copa America Finals, even the most avid fan will struggle keeping up with every kick, leap, tee-off, or innings this summer.

For brands, these events are the perfect opportunity to reach a wide audience of highly engaged consumers at scale. We have come a long way since sport’s first sponsorship deal which saw marathon runners handed Oxo drinks during the 1908 Olympic Games in London to fuel their efforts.

Today, with brands reaching avid sports fan across a range of channels as they support their favourite teams and athletes, advertising has become a key part of any tournament experience.

However, in such high stress and potentially frenzied atmospheres, brands can easily find themselves near content that would hinder their chances of reaching their audience.

The risk of the game

During the 2020 UEFA European Championships, superstar striker Cristiano Ronaldo reached over the desk he was sitting at to grab the bottles of Coca Cola in front of him. Instead of taking a sip, he pushed them out of the frame of the cameras, grabbed a bottle of water, held it up and said “water!” to the global press.

For Coca Cola, one of the tournament’s main sponsors, this snub was the opposite of what it would have wanted from their ad spend. Indeed, its share price fell by 1.6% in the aftermath.

While this level of negative ad placement won’t happen to many brands, the truth is that these sporting events present just as many pitfalls as they do opportunities. Negative news stories around these competitions are nothing new, and international news often seeps into these environments.

The Russian Olympic team, for example, has been banned following both a doping scandal and the country's invasion of Ukraine, while the lead up to the 2022 World Cup saw host nation Qatar’s human rights violations brought up regularly in the press.

Once tournaments start, the risk of brand safety issues only hightens. Just as the outcome of a 100 metre sprint can change in a split second, the narrative around these events can shift rapidly, with media outlets and social media streams quickly picking up negative stories. For example, in the fallout of the 2021 UEFA Euros final loss, a number of England players were racially abused on social media, with the story being picked up by all major news outlets.

These fast moving events demand fast moving tools – but far too often advertisers are left reliant on outdated safety solutions.

Shuffling the defence

Keyword block lists have, for many years, been the first line of defence for advertisers against potential brand safety issues. However, in today’s fast moving online landscape, these tools no longer cut it. Their blunt approach not only risks harmful ad placements, but can reduce the reach of ad spend.

For example, if a controversy erupted around a player within a football team, marketers will need to react quickly to stay away from coverage of this player. But blocking their name could also cut off advertisers from perfectly safe content – such as match reports.

For this modern problem a modern solution is needed – this is where AI can prove pivotal. AI-powered solutions, such as Mantis Brand Safety, better ascertain the true context and sentiment of any webpage, rapidly and at scale.

These solutions also give advertisers greater control over their specific brand safety needs. Mantis Brand Safety is aligned with Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) guidelines to maintain rigorous standards and allow marketers to customise the solution to their brand safety needs.

Playing to the crowd

In most sports, one of the keys to success is precision. Whether it's keeping your tennis serve inside the court by millimetres, leaving the blocks on the split-second the starter pistol goes, or nestling a football in the top corner, success can rest on finding moments of quality within the finest of margins.

For a successful summer of sports, advertisers must take this approach and harness tools that allow them to more effectively place their ads in high quality and contextually relevant locations. Mantis Curate provides marketers with access to trusted and premium publishers that have been uniquely created to ensure maximum contextual relevance.

These tools allow marketers to weave themselves into the narrative of the tournament itself, following specific teams or athletes as their journeys unfold – while safe in the knowledge that negative content will be avoided. Dynamic ad delivery also serves fans up-to-date messaging that reacts to what is happening on the field.

If the England team goes deep into the tournament and the weather brightens up, a supermarket may want to deliver ads around its barbeque range. Dynamic ads take this a step further and show consumers where their nearest bricks and mortar store is.

As the summer of sport starts to truly heat up, having the right brand safety solution will be key for any brand looking to find their audience while avoiding red cards. Embracing the power of AI-enabled solutions gives advertisers the control and precision needed to navigate these fast-paced tent-pole events.

If you’d like to find out more about how our suite of solutions can power your summer of sport advertising, get in touch with our team.

The retail media network explosion of the last few years won’t have passed many advertisers by. Globally, it is the fastest growing channel, with a 21.8% increase in forecast spend this year alone. This equates to around £110 billion of spend that was committed to retail media – by 2025 this figure is expected to be £130 billion.

This is unsurprising considering the benefits that these networks can bring to advertisers, especially with the cookie set to disappear. Advertisers gain access to the granular first-party data that retailers have on their shoppers in a privacy-secure fashion, unlocking a treasure trove of insights. With consumers already in a shopping mood when they reach these sites, ads are also less intrusive and gain an increased contextual relevance.

With the potential for advertisers to reach consumers with such precision at scale, it is no wonder that global retail giants such as Amazon, Walmart, and Target Roundel have all established their own networks. As more networks emerge and advertisers commit further spend into these environments however, retail media networks will start to become increasingly crowded. As this happens, brands and agencies will need to start asking themselves what they can do to stand out and return value through these networks.

Opening up the offsite

Retail media networks are becoming more than just a selection of ad slots within a retailers’ network. Instead they are opening up into a world of offsite opportunities thanks to partnerships with publishers. Two-thirds of publishers (69%) have said that they will prioritise retail media in the next 12–18 months, with 83% looking at embedding products on their web pages. 

As publishers and advertisers look towards a cookieless world these networks offer a revenue opportunity that is too good to turn down. For advertisers, these partnerships combine the reliability and safety of retail media networks with the reach of the open web. Consumers benefit from these relationships by being served more relevant and targeted ads without unwillingly giving up their data.

This opening up of retail media to off-site ad slots is clearly a positive for every part of the advertising ecosystem.

A curated approach

While retail media networks will be looking to partner with premium publishers to ensure that advertisers can access brand safe and high quality ad slots, ensuring that ads are highly targeted to your audience could still be a challenge. This is where curation will be a key asset to marketers.

Curated ad inventory divides web pages into niche categories depending on the audience that an advertiser wants to reach. With AI-enabled brand suitability tools able to read the exact sentiment of a page, these premium ad slots can be more effectively classified so that advertisers utilising a retail media network are reaching their audience with great precision.

As more spend heads towards retail media networks and these networks begin to expand, off-site publisher ad slots will become an increasingly powerful way to gain campaign reach while still maintaining the brand safety and targeting efficiency that retail media networks offer. However, the key to maximising both spend and reach will lie with curation of these premium ad slots. By embracing tools that can more effectively classify web pages, advertisers will be able to better reach their target audience across a retail media network.

Contextual targeting is not just a passing trend; it's an emerging force that will gain even more traction over the next 12-18 months, if not sooner.

Opinions about contextual advertising are diverse and divided. Today, I'd like to shed light on the power and performance we've observed with Mantis, and how you can leverage contextual as the powerful targeting tool it is.

As an industry, we've often struggled to fully grasp the true value context can offer. This is primarily because we've been viewing contextual at a very high level. For instance, we suggest advertising football boots in sports sections or wellies and sunglasses in fashion sections - while this approach achieves decent results, it doesn't tap into the transformative power of contextual advertising. To do that, we need to think outside the box - a strategy that the Mantis team has been actively implementing with publishers, agencies and advertisers over the past 18 months.

Allow me to share some examples of the Mantis segments we've built and provide insight into the impressive performance you can achieve with your content and environments by adopting a fresh approach to contextual.

Consider the wellies and sunglasses example mentioned earlier. A conventional approach would target fashion content - a solid base for sure. But to really elevate performance, we need to consider life situations and content environments that align with the consumer's mindset when they encounter our marketing. For instance, we created a wellie segment that includes:

• Fashion content
• 'What's on' content (e.g., walking, outdoor activities)
• Garden content
• Festival content
• Royal fashion content

These are just a few ways to view contextual through a new lens and enhance performance. With Mantis, you can construct numerous deep contextual segments. And yes, I hear your concerns about scale!

Scale is a significant hurdle in transforming contextual into the powerful tool we've proven it to be at Mantis. But that's where our industry can unite and offer curated contextual marketplaces. Here at Mantis, we’re eager to collaborate and assist with this.

If there's one key takeaway I want you to remember, it's this: view contextual in a new light. Don't just target mattresses in mattress content, advertising in health and bad back content, moving house content, property content. Aim to place your advertising targeting in an environment where it is most beneficial and resonates with your users' mindset.

See in the image above the CTR performance on mantis campaigns which have been enhanced by contextual targeting.