We are now on the verge of the rebirth of contextual advertising: Luiz Felipe Barros

“Our technology enables us to focus on a lot of media pieces and drive business growth, at the same time protect your brand and reputation. We do that in a way that we don’t compromise on either,” says Luiz Felipe Barros the Global CMO at Channel Factory, a global brand suitability and contextual advertising platform.

While the growth of digital platforms provides an opportunity to target audiences, it also led to regulatory challenges. Barros says this is not a concern for Channel Factory as the platform has future-proofed itself. He explains, “All our data is cookieless and PII less (Personally identifiable information). We have partnerships with all social media platforms and we can analyze and categorize videos and private API are partners. Thanks to that we can create segmentations that are contextual. So, I don’t need cookies, PII. All my segmentation is based on the content that people are watching. So, I am already future-proof to any regulations that are focusing on private personal data from consumers and technology as well because I am directly connected to the platforms. Cookie permission does not impact what we do.”

Commenting on why advertisers should be on Channel Factory, Barros says that their data is exclusive. Access to social media platforms allows Channel Factory to create categorizations that are very granular and create any type of segmentation that are not available on the shelf on any of the platforms. He says that Google is for everyone and any advertiser – large or small – has the same access to segmentation. He adds, “Our segmentation allows you tailor-made and custom segmentation that fulfills your own needs and also allows to eliminate the impressions that are not suitable for your brand.” Citing an example, he says an alcohol brand would not want to be associated which content that shows drinking under influence. Channel Factory also has an social media AI-based platform that is cross-channel. This allows optimization of budget in real-time across multiple channels.

In the recent past, Channel Factory has expanded significantly in the APAC region – a diverse multi-cultural and multi-lingual region – and the platform is betting big on this region. Barros says that the platform currently recognizes 49 different languages and of geared to understand not just the video content but also the context of the video and the cultural nuances. He says, “The combination of using relevance to categorize content but at the same time having local specialist that understand the market and the industry to make it relevant to brands and agencies regardless of what is the need, that is critical for us. We have global technology, a scalable platform but we believe that business happens on a local level.” He adds, “We do this on a granular level. Every language and every new market we enter, we customize the approach and bring in local experts to help us understand how to do the segmentation and categorization and leverage the technology in the most appropriate way for each region, state and even categories.”

Talking about brand safety he says, “Brand safety is our bread and butter, it’s how we started and are most passionate about.” He also says that the platform adheres to the guidelines prescribed by the World Federation of Advertisers and GARM (Global Alliance for Responsible Media) and this can be augmented to meet the specific need of clients. He adds, “We can work on any social platform and can optimize across those platforms. This is critical as advertisers say that I am going to put x amount on YouTube, y amount on Meta but the ability to optimize towards your outcomes and business goals across those platforms is very complex. We can allocate automatically leveraging our AI solution.” In addition, he says that Channel Factory’s reporting model is granular and can report to the advertiser not only by the audience but by each channel, how the performance is on each channel. This can be optimized based on the outcome bringing in efficiency and higher RoI to the business.

On a final note he says, “We are now on the verge of a rebirth of contextual advertising. It is efficient and effective. If you put the right content and creative in front of a consumer, it is not only knowing who the consumer is, it is why they are doing it and put it in a right context. So, this rebirth of contextual advertising may be in the light of the regulations and the new tech implementation that are happening.”