After more than two years leading ad sales at Group Black, Kerel Cooper has left to take on the CMO role at contextual intelligence platform GumGum.
Cooper is a well-known thought leader on the topic of promoting Black-owned media investment, which he did at Group Black, a collective of Black-owned publishers. Before that, he spent more than seven years at email-based marketing platform LiveIntent, including as CMO.
Contextual advertising is newly hot in that everything-old-is-new-again kind of way.
And it plays a really important role in how brands are trying to reach potential customers and build relationships with them, Cooper told AdExchanger. In addition to the rising tide of privacy regulations limiting access to user data, Cooper also cited attention as a big reason why he said there’s a growing business opportunity in contextual advertising.
Digital marketers want to do more than just get in front of users. Successful advertising “is about reaching people when they’re highly engaged,” Cooper said, as in, when they’re actually paying attention to or interacting with content.
As CMO, Cooper said he plans to focus on “making sure we’re building the right relationships with agencies and brands, and [that we’re] in a position to help them accomplish their goals.”
Paying attention to context
GumGum’s contextual technology helps brands strategize their media plans based on engagement, relevance and attention.
The company uses AI to scan text, images, video and audio and pair that information with data about attention patterns and ad effectiveness in digital environments. Attention has been a core part of GumGum’s strategy since it acquired attention measurement platform Playground xyz in 2021.
The attention piece is particularly important, Cooper said, because it’s a way for brands to stand out from their competitors. “Every marketer is vying for the attention of a particular consumer as a starting point to building long-term relationships with those consumers,” he said.
But some signals that are considered contextual may be more helpful to brands than others, he said.
A website’s URL may be contextual information, for example, but it’s not an indicator of attentiveness or engagement because it has no relation to a person’s intent when they visited that page, Cooper said. People often bounce or click on URLs by accident.
By contrast, contextual signals like the tone of a particular piece and how long someone spent consuming it, for example, are more indicative of engagement level, he said.
And that’s where attention comes in.
The most important aspect of a contextual targeting strategy, Cooper said, is reaching consumers when they’re most receptive to seeing a relevant ad.
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