Late last year, context and brand suitability specialist Pixability hired John Danby, previously of MiQ, to lead the expansion of the company’s European operations.
Even outside of the European expansion, it’s a busy time for Pixability. The company has been adapting its tools for CTV environments, while also handling changing attitudes towards brand safety and suitability, and a renewed interest in contextual targeting as an alternative to cookie-based solutions.
VideoWeek spoke with Danby to hear how Pixability has been handling the shift towards CTV, as well as insights on why strict contextual targeting on YouTube can sometimes backfire.
How has Pixability’s product been adapted for CTV? What differences are there in measuring context and brand safety in CTV, compared with desktop and mobile?
Three years ago, Pixability’s product was focused on YouTube, but now it incorporates YouTube (including YouTube on TV screens) as well as other leading CTV platforms including Roku, Hulu, Amazon Fire TV. The incredible thing that we’ve seen is that now 68 percent of adults over the age of 18 in the UK watch YouTube on TV screens, so this is an incredible opportunity that we can help brands tap into (Source: Pixability UK Consumer Study, February 2022).
Measuring brand suitability on CTV platforms is a bit different from measuring it on YouTube because there is far less user-generated content. However, we can still apply the same technology and algorithms that evaluate content based on GARM’s frameworks for safety and suitability, to create very effective guardrails.
On YouTube, what does Pixability add beyond Google’s native targeting controls and brand safety capabilities?
In terms of targeting, PixabilityONE adds much more granularity (5X-10X) than a human could create in Google’s native platforms. This granularity allows a brand that wants to test multiple creative executions against multiple targets, to optimize at the most granular level. In terms of brand safety, Google has done an amazing job in the past half-dozen years making YouTube a safe place to advertise, but when it comes to brand suitability, that’s very subjective and advertiser-specific.
This is where Pixability’s BrandShield technology helps leverage the deepest data set (about 32,000X what an advertiser would have access to on their own), to attach more nuanced information to channels so they can fit an advertisers’ specific needs. For example, our platform can tell if a YouTube channel produces made-for-kids content, or if it’s run by an influencer that recently took an extreme political stance. Both of these things can affect whether a channel is suitable for one brand and not suitable for another.
We hear a lot about YouTube viewing shifting to CTV – how much YouTube viewing does Pixability now see occurring in CTV environments?
As I mentioned before, we just did a study on consumers in the UK and found that 87 percent of adults in the UK are on YouTube, and 68 percent of them watch YouTube content on their TV screens. This again is why YouTube presents a huge opportunity for both reach and targeting opportunities as a European brand can serve ads to someone in their living room television, after they searched for a product on Google.
A Pixability/GARM report on YouTube Brand Safety and Suitability found some surprising conclusions – including finding that “focusing YouTube investment in the content category most aligned with that industry often leads to subpar performance”. Why is this the case, and how should brands adapt contextual strategy in light of that?
Contextual targeting is a very different animal on YouTube because consumers jump from content category to content category regardless of what they may be looking to buy in their everyday lives. For example, I may be in the market for a new car, but when I go to YouTube I may be still viewing my favourite music, cooking, sports, and humour content and very little auto content.
Our study in partnership with GARM showed that Automotive content on YouTube was in fact NOT the highest performing content for auto advertisers in the first half of 2021, because of this phenomenon. A lot of 3rd-party providers want advertisers to think that contextual targeting is a magic bullet on YouTube, but it’s just one tool among many. Other tools such as behavioural targeting, can often have a bigger impact on ad engagement. A car company may find more potential buyers by targeting viewers who searched for new cars in Google and then viewed music content on YouTube than they would just by targeting viewers of automotive content.
We’ve heard a lot over the past couple of years about the harms of excessive keywords blocking – for example how blocking words relating to the pandemic or the George Floyd riots could essentially defund coverage of those topics. Have you seen changes in attitudes towards keyword blocking in light of these cases?
Excessive keyword blocking is another topic we covered in our study with GARM. To illustrate the downside of excessive blocking, we used the example that if you include the keyword “knife” in your blocklist in an attempt to avoid content related to violence, you’d be blocking 8.7M views of premium content on the Food Network alone.
We’ve seen all the major media agencies abandoning the old “block everything” mentality, in favour of a much more nuanced approach.
Pixability is expanding in Europe at the moment – which markets are you focused on? And what are the specific challenges with expanding into Europe?
Pixability has had a strong presence in Europe since 2015, but we’re accelerating our growth now because of the exponential growth of YouTube and CTV we’ve seen in the region in the past two years. We will be working with international brands and agencies throughout Europe, with particular focus on the UK, Germany, France, BeNeLux, Scandinavia and other areas where these platforms are becoming a critical part of the marketing mix.
