India’s digital ecosystem is more crowded than ever. Growing at 10%+ per year, the booming digital media industry will be worth more than $73B US in just a couple of short years and digital advertising is a growing part of the revenue models supporting it. Called by The Trade Desk “the most exciting market in the world” global and regional companies are flooding into India to capture their share of the projected growth.
As a result of this frenzy, audiences are bombarded with ads at every turn, leading to ad fatigue and a growing resistance to irrelevant promotions. Just as the market is becoming mature, advertisers and media companies are faced with the challenge of “ad blindness” across their target audience.
One logical strategy is for advertisers to create more relevant, targeted advertising. However, with the phase-out of third-party cookies and increasing privacy regulations, brands must rethink their targeting strategies and consider new innovations that can break through the noise and attract attention.
Several breakthroughs are creating the relevance advertisers need, including new ad formats and contextual targeting, which ensures that brands connect with users when they are most receptive – by aligning high-impact ads with the content they are engaging with.
Contextual advertising in India is evolving beyond just keyword-based placements, and is being combined with creative new ad formats across different digital media channels.
Advertisers have several strategies to choose from:
Building Brand Relevance Amid Information Overload: Rather than simply be “everywhere,” a smart contextual targeting strategy ensures that advertisers are in the right places – adjacent to relevant articles, videos and social posts. Contextual targeting helps advertisers cut through the noise by delivering messages that are specifically tailored to the content a user is engaging with. Good contextual targeting is so effective that it actually out-performs audience targeting.
Omnichannel Consistency: With a multichannel media buying strategy, advertisers can create consistent relevance across various channels— be it social media, OTT platforms, websites, or mobile apps. When audiences go about their day, they use a mix of these channels, and advertisers that create a cross-channel campaign based can reach audiences in more places with more effectiveness.
Cross-Platform Contextual Awareness: Contextual advertising will no longer be siloed by platform. For instance, a user who is watching a travel vlog on YouTube may be served a relevant ad for flight tickets. If the same user later browses a travel blog on their smartphone, the same suite will recognize the context and serve the same, but slightly different, relevant ad based on their evolving interests.
Automated Creative Versioning: Advertisers can work with partners to dynamically generate and optimize ad creatives based on content, creating even deeper relevance. India’s linguistic and cultural diversity requires a contextual approach that adapts to different regions, languages, and user preferences, data that can be fed into the creative versioning algorithms.
In the not-so-distant future contextual ad suites will incorporate deep learning models that will increase speed, scale and relevance. Many of the innovations listed above will become more powerful using AI, more real-time, and able to analyze many more data points. Solutions using natural language processing and large language models like GPT are already advancing beyond the keyword-based approach, processing not just keywords, but also the sentiment, intent, and emotions behind the content.
With AI, platforms will orchestrate contextual consistency seamlessly across channels, and create even more relevant dynamic advertising automatically.
As the digital advertising landscape in India evolves, some contextual players have exited the market, leaving brands searching for advanced solutions that balance privacy, relevance, and scale. This shift underscores the growing need for AI-powered contextual advertising that can drive meaningful engagement without relying on third-party data.
At Kargo, we see this as an opportunity to introduce a next-generation contextual targeting suite, powered by IBM Watson’s advanced AI capabilities. Advertisers get the power to place their ads in relevant contexts with more precision than ever before. AI contextual targeting gives advertisers more control and improves performance.
As brands navigate a cookieless future, contextual advertising offers a privacy-first way to drive meaningful engagement. At Kargo, we’re committed to bringing the most advanced AI-powered contextual solutions to India, ensuring that advertisers can deliver relevant, effective, and scalable campaigns
About Kargo:
Kargo creates memorable experiences to captivate consumer attention and deliver the only media marketplace with 100% premium supply for brands. With a suite of exclusive cross channel advertising solutions, it is the choice for leading brands looking to drive meaningful customer connections across mobile, desktop, connected television, and social. Focused on performance, Kargo helps the world’s largest advertisers achieve incremental brand lift and higher returns on ad spend. For publishers, Kargo’s proprietary platform maximises revenue per impression through unique creative and targeting solutions.
