Whether you’re a publisher or advertiser, the right context makes all the difference to how users interact with your messages.
Discover the effect context has on our brain, consumer behaviour and conversion rates. We’ll present fresh evidence from the fields of neuroscience, behavioural psychology and linguistics.
Learn how you can create environments to enable context to work in your favour, and increase engagement.
As presented at PI LIVE 2018 - Europe's premier Performance Marketing Conference - https://performancein.live
2. About vi
We connect publishers, content providers
and brands through video storytelling.
Best Video Marketing
& Advertiser Platform
Best Video
Distribution Platform
Best new product or service
3. At vi we believe that the most
important factor in delivering video
is context.
Context is everything
synonyms: circumstances, conditions, surroundings
context
noun
the parts of something written or spoken that immediately precede and follow a word or
passage and clarify its meaning.
4. 1. Research on the impact of contextual video content
2. The science of storytelling in context
3. Five Tips for selecting a video partner
Context is everything
7. Contextual video impact research
33%
Advertising real
reach increased
by 42%
increase in page
engagement
8. Contextual video impact research
33%
Advertising real
reach increased
by 42%
increase in page
engagement
A publisher
Halo effect
9. The publisher halo effect
Reasearch by Lumen
Commissioned by vi,
2018
vi stories increased
publisher recall by
83%
10. The case for context
"I really like that it's actually gaming
content that fits my content exactly
and not some random ad.”
Alex Grasser, RandomChievos
”So far, we've found contextual video has
not only been a boon to our revenue
efforts, but as the data conveys, has
improved our overall user experience”
Paul Nyhart, The Wrap
14. Context is everything - Storytelling
“If you think about the emotions that are triggered
by a story, it’s absolutely fascinating when you think
about what’s happening to the brain itself.”
Ali Jennings, Neuroscience PHD
17. Context is everything - Storytelling
Dr. Ali Jennings, Neuroscience PHD
“If you manage to make your character really grateful
to a product, then the person who’s watching it
doesn’t really have a choice: they’re going to be
grateful as well.”
19. Context is everything - Storytelling
“If you are reading a piece of content, and
someone has put an advert in there that is of
no relevance to you, you will simply not
even see it.”
Dr. Ali Jennings, Neuroscience PHD
21. Context is everything - Storytelling
““If you land your brand in the middle of a
story about something you do not want
associated with your brand there’s nothing
you can do – it’s been linked… and you can’t
unlink it.”
Dr. Ali Jennings, Neuroscience PHD
22. “Make your brand a part of the wider story, by fitting in with
existing page content, and you can increase the power of
the empathy generated by your advertising.”
Dr. Ali Jennings, Neuroscience PhD
Storytelling in context
“What the brain does, is choose what it pays attention to.
You’re constantly scanning your environment for things
that are important to you, and if something like that comes up,
you will pay attention to it.”
24. Symbolic consumption is the expression of status,
self-image and/or group affiliation through purchase of
goods and services.
Storytelling in context – symbolic consumption
28. Definition of congruous | con·gru·ous
1a: being in agreement, harmony, or correspondence
b: conforming to the circumstances or requirements of a
situation : APPROPRIATE
2: marked or enhanced by harmonious agreement among constituent elements
Context is everything - Linguistics
29. Context is everything - Linguistics
“We all know how hard brands work to develop and tell
their stories…
but there’s got to be a neat fit between what the
message is, what the product is, and where it’s
displayed”
Professor Margaret Hogg, University of Lancaster
30. Contextual video impact research
33%
Advertising real
reach increased
by 42%
increase in page
engagement
A publisher
Halo effect
32. Five Considerations for a video partner
1. Integrations / reliability
• Does the partner offer flexibility to integrate?
• Does the partner tech play nicely with other ad units?
33. Five Considerations for a video partner
1. Integrations / reliability
2. Quality and Breadth of Content
34. Five Considerations for a video partner
1. Integrations / reliability
2. Quality and Breadth of Content
• What type of publication are you?
• How does your video content strategy enhance the publication?
• Can your video partner support that strategy?
35. Five Considerations for a video partner
1. Integrations / reliability
2. Quality and Breadth of Content
3. User Experience
36. Five Considerations for a video partner
1. Integrations / reliability
2. Quality and Breadth of Content
3. User Experience
• Does your video partner enhance or detract from your end UX?
• Where can your partners video unit be placed?
37. Five Considerations for a video partner
1. Integrations / reliability
4. Demand Layer
2. Quality and Breadth of Content
3. User Experience
38. Five Considerations for a video partner
1. Integrations / reliability
4. Demand Layer
2. Quality and Breadth of Content
3. User Experience
• Do you have your own sales team?
• Can your video provider support that team or lack thereof?
• How much flexibility can your video partner offer you?
39. Five Considerations for a video partner
1. Integrations / reliability
4. Demand Layer
2. Quality and Breadth of Content
3. User Experience
5. Editorial Approval
Hi Everyone – We are here with video intelligence and today we are going to talk about the importance of context and offer our suggestions for 5 key considerations to selecting a video partner.
video publisher and syndication company in 2008 called Viewster with long form contents and in-stream ad supported
By 2016 we separated the ad tech side of our business from the publishing side. In an attempt to address some of the shifts that we were seeing and to create value in the market we created our own contextual video platform and rolled it out as vi.
The vi stories product has been well received and is now being utilized by many large publishers to help increase the amount of contextually relevant video content for their webpages.
It has also been nominated for multiple awards by various industry publications.
At vi we believe that context is everything.
If you apply this definition to our industry, context would be all pieces of information on page that creates an environement– text, images, videos, sounds
Show the Importance of context to publishers and advertisers and ultimately give you food for thought as you make decisions about your video strategy moving into 2019 and beyond.
This morning I’m going to whizz through three aspects of context, particularly in relation to video.
Why is it that we believe context is everything? Well that’s because its what the evidence and the science tells us.
We commissioned research by Lumen using eye-tracking technology because we wanted to know how contextually placed video content affected publisher’s sites and advertising.
On the right hand side you will see the heat graph representing exactly where on the page the user spent the most time viewing. As you can see things really heat up on the video player about 1/3 of the way down the page. the reasons why users pay attention to contextually relevant content and ignore content which is not relevant.
Here are some of the results that we saw from that research.
Users were 42% more likely to remember the advertisement they saw when it was placed in front contextually relevant video.
Eyeball time on page increased by 33%.
That means users spent one third longer on the page with contextual video
Meaning engagement rate increase
Overall we noticed a publisher Halo effect
When you place relevant video contents
Positive sentiment increased while negative sentiment decreased
Here we have some testimonials from sites that have seen success from contextual video strategies
Olivier
First let’s watch a video that we feel shows the power of storytelling.
Given our name is ‘video intelligence’ we thought we should speak to some clever people. We’ll share here some interviews we conducted which explain the power of video.
Then we will give you 5 suggestions for what you should be thinking about when selecting a video partner.
Lastly we will give you an example of how it looks when it all comes together.
To get us going here’s a classic commercial, which has all the right ingredients.
PLAY FILM
Think about the commercial you just saw, we don’t see Stella until the very end of the story. Lets explore some of the reasons for that.
In order to understand just how powerful context is, and what effect it has on us, we need to understand exactly what goes on inside the head of someone who is engaged with a story.
Here, Dr. Ali Jennings of UCL explains the hormones that are released by stories.
So now we understand that a well structured story, can release chemicals that have effect on us.
Think back to that commercial we just watched, and how your stress levels were immediately piqued. The pilot has crashed and been wounded. His enemy is in hot pursuit. The barman wants to help him but the thought of wasting just a drop of Stella was too much for him to bear.
But what about the product itself, how does that get involved?
Again, think about how the commercial made you feel. In the film, the hero is Stella, in a way it saved everyone, and we’re grateful.
So now we understand the power of stories, and how they effect us, but what about context?
Here Dr Jennings will describe how the brain behaves, and how surroundings affect our reception of messages.
---
So we can see how products can play an important role, and elicit empathy from us. This is all very well for advertisers, how is it relevant to publishers looking for video partners?
So the context, the content, the environment, in which advertising is displayed is so important. Think back to what Dr Jennings said about context. Content about trainers on a page about the stock market is not going to register with the consumer.
Think about the way in which you consume words, pictures, sound and moving image online: you’re on a mission, or a journey of discovery or education. You’re trying to find a solution to a problem online. If something is irrelevant to you, you will simply ignore it. Forget just for a minute that you are all digital media expert and place yourself behind the eyes of a lambda internet users.
We’ve all done it, and we all know one term for it – banner blindness.
But this blindness goes beyond just banners, and extends to irrelevant video content, and native solutions.
Hence we believe contextually placed video is the key to a great user experience, and therefore retention of users, and happy advertisers – who pay more.
And finally on the topic of neuroscience, Dr. Jennings explains what happens when everything goes wrong.
So brand safety is not just something that advertisers should worry about, it’s a problem for publishers too. Poor content, or even risky content can damage on perceptions of your brand as a publisher.
And I’d extend this to tech partners to provide the right relevant contents, whatever these are images, videos or texts.
Think back to 2017 when Pepsi tried to harness the Black Lives Matter movement in the US. However they got the casting of Kendal Jenner and they understood the context and symbolic wrong, and ultimately faced a significant amount of backlash, pulling the campaign.
Storytelling within your advertising is one thing, but it can be made more powerful by ensuring your story sits within a relevant context. Make your brand a part of the wider story, by fitting in with existing page content, and you can increase the power of the empathy and trust generated by your page content and your advertising.
In other words – the more contextually relevant everything a user sees on page is the more likely that user is to truly consume the entire page.
Empathy.
Product pays a key role in the story.
Because you’re emotionally invested in the story, you become attached to John Lewis.
Now let’s look at how context affects, how people and brands are perceived.
The concept of symbolic consumption refers to the the expression of status, self-image and or group affiliation… through purchase of goods and services.
In other words, how we communicate things via brands.
That could be via the labels we wear on our clothes – or the political meaning taken from our reading habits.
So for example, if someone shares a link to the Guardian, that says something very different about them than if they share a link to a story on Mail Online.
Professor Margaret Hogg discusses this way we communicate symbolically with brands.
[play video]
So what Hogg is saying, is that If we consider brands – including both advertisers, and publishers, as symbols that carry meaning, then we can see the meaning and connotations that are associated.
This meaning is then passed on to advertisers on these sites.
So you can see how, that is important for brand safety – you don’t want bad associations passed on symbolically.
But it can also work in your favor- if a small sports site is running adidas ads, you’ll look good.
Let’s watch an example of how all of those associations can work. This campaign was not a video campaign, it was a spatial or outdoor execution, but it shows symbolic consumption in action really clearly.
PLAY FILM
First of all you have adidas, who wanted young people in the UK to buy their trainers.
So they associated themselves with an existing brand – the basketball player D Rose. This is a common tactic, and it works because the sportswear brand benefits from the association with an elite, cool athlete. The kids who buy the shoes are subsequently also associating themselves with this athlete, and all of the meaning that goes with that. They’re symbolically expressing their coolness.
But there’s also context at work here too.
This installation was set up in a community center in Hackney. Adidas were drawing off the street credibility brought by this location. That’s the power of context.
Next up, Professor Hogg explains more about this fit between product and place.
So being congruous win video means making sure the video content or advertising on a webpage fits, that it makes sense within the wider narrative.
In other words – the more contextually relevant everything a user sees on page is the more likely that user is to truly consume the entire page.
Whenever you are introducing content onto your page; an ad or editorial content, you must make sure there is a fit between the page and the content. If there is no fit there will be not engagement and without engagement UX will suffer and ad revenues will decrease.
Thank you to Professors Hogg and Jennings for helping us to understand the science behind the importance of context and why a publisher who uses a contextual video strategy can expect to see results like the ones above. By understanding the science of storytelling you can deliver more effective ads for your ad partners, increase your own time on page and have a positive impact on the sentiment of your users.
Just to recap that’s a 42% increase in advertising real reach meaning users could remember the ad they saw. 33 % more time on page – increasing engagement with the publisher brand as well as helping to increase key things like viewability for other ad slots on the page. Lastly an overall publisher halo effect that increased positive sentiment about the publisher while decreasing negative sentiment like “This page had annoying advertising.”
So hopefully I’ve convinced you of the power of video, when placed in context.
You might now be thinking about how to go about implementing video on your site. Well I’m going to tell you the 5 considerations you must take into account when choosing a video partner.
Now we want to offer you five key considerations for any video partner that you are evaluating based on the research and professional opinions of experts.
Can the video partner integrate in the way that works best for your team. This could be direct tags on page, via an ad server like DFP.
Is the player customizable so that its not covering up text on page or other ads? Can the partner support passbacks?
Are you a specialist niche publication with narrow focus or do you have a broad amount of diverse content?
Do you have all the content that they need to support their own pages?
If yes – is it high quality content? Are you stitching pictures together with music in the name of revenue or actually enhancing your page with high quality video?
If not, can the video partner you work with support you with a broad library of content that can bring third party video onto webpages or enhance your internal library?
Can the video partners player help automate editorial processes by introducing a contextual piece of video into the article? You cant just have quality content – you have to have that quality content in the right environment.
Can the player be placed in a variety of positions depending on the needs of a particular page and the content on that page?
If yes will the video partner support that teams efforts? Do they have “buy in” from buyers?
If no does that partner have a sales team of their own?
What are the monetization and pricing options that your video partner offers? Are the flexible structures? Do they match up with your own goals internally?
Video is both a money-making exercise and an enhancement to the page. Sit down both commercial and editorial teams and determine what is the best solution for engagement and revenue.