Have you heard of the term “contextual advertising” before? This is one of the newer ideas coming out from the online community and it may not yet be very well known and understood; regarding what it really means. Only the techies, who coined the words, know what this means but they haven’t really translated it sufficiently for general usage by the public.
Contextual advertising is the placing of ads on websites or other media, such as those displayed in mobile phones. The ready-made advertisements are selected and served by automated systems, based on the content desired by the user of this ad placement system.
This could differ much from previous advertising practices, with electronic means replacing tasks done by human beings before the advent of this new system. It is like buying clothes, ready-made, instead of having yourself measured and fitted out by your tailor.
There are three main components, technically, of online advertising:
1. The first is what they call the Creative component.
This is the most important, as this portion contains the main message of the ad. This is targeted at the online readership, aiming at generating a sale (if the ad is selling a product), or achieving any purpose the ad is intended for. The effectiveness, or the non-effectiveness, of the entire advertisement depends largely on how the content writer has thought out and written the message. Effective ads are those with contents well crafted, and worded in simple, easy to understand language. Messages poorly written tend to confuse the reader and do not achieve the purpose intended.
2. Then there is the component called media planning.
A major change has been introduced in this part of the online advertising process. Instead of human beings doing this task in this phase of online advertising, determining where to place the ads, computers now handle this. This is what is now called Contextual Advertising. Computers used for this task facilitate the ad placement across thousands of web sites. The machines are guided by keywords that lead to the choice of what prepared ad contents to place in the websites. This could save much on the budget since this automation alternative is much cheaper compared to paying salaries and wages to humans to do this task.
3. A third part of online advertising is called media buying. This details the instructions on how to pay the online advertising company for the ads they made for their clients using their service. It is very likely this instruction also points to the use of Internet banking facilities, something new but fast building up on the Internet.
There are still a number of unresolved controversies in this new system since the machines are just non-thinking robots likely to do what they are not supposed to do. That being said, the technical instructions inputted can be defective. They could intrude into websites without the owner’s knowing beforehand, leading to situations where ads find their way to unauthorized sites, giving rise to possible controversies. These technical bugs need to be ironed out first and the system refined further before contextual advertising can be considered as fully viable.
When this system becomes fully operational, minus the bugs now, this could be one of the most effective advertising tools in terms of speed and cost-effectiveness because this method will be considerably cheaper to use while allowing vast opportunity for entrepreneurs to really get their business out there. |
