From Cookies to Context, without Losing Performance: How AI is Building Alternative Pathways for Healthcare Brands
Kelsey Kimball, SVP Commercial, illuma
Three people are researching a particular medicine online. One is a patient, newly diagnosed and seeking relief from symptoms. The second is a caregiver, worried about availability and costs; and the third is a physician, researching any possible interactions with other medications.
As we know, a person’s online journey is rarely linear and almost impossible to accurately predict. So these individuals will approach the same search with different intentions and in entirely different mindsets. They’ll also approach it along different online pathways, via content which aligns with their wider interests.
For example – as well as researching medication costs, the caregiver might also be looking to buy a new car, price up concert tickets for a teenager and keep up to date with state-level news and weather. They may be open to engaging with the healthcare brand in any one of those online contexts.
But traditional tools such as static persona targeting can miss these key engagement moments along the way. Throw into the mix the fact that diseases and symptoms can progress faster than audience lists are updated, and it’s clear that pharma marketers need targeting solutions that are responsive and adaptable, and work across topics based on real-life engagements, without compromising privacy or performance.
This is where AI-driven contextual advertising can really excel, providing flexibility to target ads for real-world, non-linear journeys.
Privacy-first and performance-first, too
Contextual targeting has always been a reliable way for marketers to reach online audiences without running into privacy risks. It’s particularly useful for sensitive categories such as healthcare and pharmaceutical, as relevance is established by looking at the content of a page, screen or app, rather than the identity of the individual.
Yet so far, contextual has been limited in both scale and accuracy, and entirely dependent on picking the right keywords in the planning process. In a similar way to persona targeting, contextual has been unable to adapt nor respond to the individual user journey – especially those additional, non-predictable topics which can be difficult to plan for. With contextual, the ad generally matches the content – so our caregiver is unlikely to meet pharma branding until they’ve landed on a page or piece of content about the specific illness and symptoms.
With the help of AI and Machine Learning, contextual is now evolving though, and many of these limitations are being overcome. For example, at illuma, enhanced processing speeds are allowing our technology to act upon contextual trends within live campaigns, as they happen. These include content consumption patterns from consented users, and information about the contextual environments and topics driving the best engagement or awareness for each campaign.
When considered at scale, those additional topics become useful extra data inputs which can be captured and acted upon in real time, with campaigns pivoting towards highest performing context-types. Ads begin to show up where and when they are most likely to have an impact, across additional topics based on live insights, and across the web, CTV and apps.
Contextual plus behavioral – without the risks
By working in real-time this way, contextual performance is being super-charged by audience behavioral data without any risk to privacy or brand. Instead of predicting who someone is, we prioritize what they’re engaging with right now — and why that matters.
Data inputs are updated daily, so that contextual behaviors are modelled throughout the life of a campaign, offering informed scale – another limitation of both cookie-based and traditional contextual targeting.
This is all done without viewing or storing personal data which brings with it risks associated with accidentally violating privacy legislation – as was recently acknowledged by illuma’s new membership of the NAI. Just as treatments are tailored for individuals, so the ideal communications strategy should be, too. Contextual AI, optimized for outcomes by AI agents which continually test and learn, are showing that ethical, privacy-first advertising really works.
About Illuma
Illuma is a British AI company pioneering contextual solutions for enterprise since 2014. Its real-time scaling technology is used by brands and agencies to boost the results of digital ad campaigns. Meanwhile, broadcasters, publishers and online platforms use Illuma to organise, classify and categorise their inventory for commercial activation. Illuma was founded by publishing experts and computer scientists from Imperial College, UCL and Cambridge University. The company is based in London with additional offices in New York.