Hasta La Creative!

Ask 100 marketers to describe “contextual advertising,” and you are likely to get 400 vague, optimistic answers about the “right message at the right time and place to the right person.” Ask 100 startup CEOs and you’re likely to get 1,000 black-box answers that will confound you.

There lies the core conundrum. Everybody wants “contextual advertising” but no one knows how to get there with all this techno-babble black-box confusion. This leaves marketers scrambling to figure it out amid a plethora of platforms with their glossy contextual promises that may fall short of what a marketer really needs.

So let’s deconstruct the contextual equation recognizing that “contextual tech” covers a wide swath of ad tech. I’ve confined this highly simplified schema to those technologies that directly drive the “right time/place/message/person” model in the programmatic world for advertisers, leaving out many branches of the ad-tech tree. From this very focused, programmatic perch, we have an excellent view into the highly variable contextual tech landscape:

Continue reading at AdAge.com