RANCHO PALOS VERDES, CALIF. – With digital advertising facing mounting challenges around identity and privacy, media giants are looking to alternative strategies that can deliver personalized experiences without relying on individual user data.
The industry has entered what one executive calls “the age of relevance,” where understanding the emotional context of content creates powerful opportunities for brands to connect with audiences in meaningful ways.
“Technology is truly unlocking a media company’s ability to understand and activate their content in a way that would have simply put, been unimaginable five years ago,” said Derek Gatts, VP, Streaming and Digital Ad Strategy and Innovation, Warner Bros. Discovery, in this video interview with Beet.TV.
Contextual targeting renaissance
Warner Bros. Discovery has been developing solutions to leverage the emotional states viewers experience while consuming content, rather than relying solely on identity-based targeting that faces increasing limitations.
“The age of relevance for us is really about how do you show up for those viewers in the right time, in the right context, at the right moment while fully respecting their privacy,” Gatts explained.
“Relevance is relative. Advertisers and brands have unique messaging needs at any given point, but viewers also are constantly in a unique emotional state with different messaging receptivity based on the content that they’re watching.”
This approach has materialized in WBD’s “Moments” contextual targeting solution, which creates extensive metadata around content that advertisers can use to place their messages in emotionally resonant environments. According to Gatts, this strategy allows brands to “draft off of the emotional state that a viewer is in” during key content moments, reaching audiences that might otherwise be non-addressable due to opt-outs or platform limitations.
Simplifying the buying experience
Beyond contextual targeting, WBD has been working to streamline the increasingly complex advertising ecosystem through bundled solutions that make it easier for brands to buy across their portfolio.
The company recently unveiled NEO, a comprehensive buying platform that Gatts describes as “a major step forward” in addressing fragmentation. The platform allows advertisers to “purchase our inventory, plan it, buy it, measure it, all through a single buying platform,” he said, “really trying to remove the complexity and the fees and the silos that have traditionally existed across buying platforms.”
WBD’s strategy is developing integrated solutions that provide advertisers with more direct access to its inventory across streaming, linear, and other channels, responding to industry demands for greater transparency and efficiency.
Commerce meets content
WBD is also venturing into shoppable content, an area Gatts acknowledges is still “in its early innings”.
The company launched “Shop HBO Max” ahead of Black Friday last year, built on the observation that premium content inspires consumer behavior. “Whether it is the White Lotus selling out Four Seasons reservations in Thailand or Minecraft toys flying off the shelf when we released the Minecraft movie, we know that that behavior exists,” Gatts said.
The challenge, though, has been connecting that inspiration to immediate action. WBD’s solution leverages contextual metadata to identify products appearing in content and present purchase opportunities to viewers in real-time.
“We have seen over the last year that that inspiration is driving about a 12 to 15X lift in engagement,” Gatts revealed. “If you take as a brand, your top selling products, you’re going to get 15 times better performance if instead of you just showing your best products, you show the products that the viewer just saw in our content.”
