News Article Published:
Friday, 28 September 2007
Category:
Financial Services
Banks and insurance companies may not have to pay for contextual advertising as it has been claimed that out-of-context ads can be as efficient.
Specifically targeted contextual ads have long been touted as the best way to reach online customers but new research questions this received knowledge.
A study by Yahoo! and MediaVest discovered that ads displayed out of context - not close to product-related content - had a similar impact on consumers.
The tests were conducted on consumers who were passionate about a subject - in this case food - and measured brand affinity among the consumers.
While brand affinity for coffee product Tassimo - the test product - increased 26 per cent among consumers shown its adverts on the Yahoo!Food page and 21 per cent for the consumers who saw the ads on the Yahoo!News page.
Jim Kite, president of connections research and analytics at MediaVest told adweek: "Targeting the right people is more important than the content."
And because the research was conducted on passionate consumers, dubbed 'passionistas', it was said to refer to the valuable demographic that recommends products.
Among this group, the results seemed to show that the passion for a subject was what made ads effective, and not their placement.
"If a brand aligns with a passion, it doesn't matter where the audience is," said Edwin Wong, director of consumer insights at Yahoo! told adweek.
<< back to latest industry news