By Victoria McNally
Let’s say you’re developing a connected TV marketing campaign for Nike. You’d probably have the most success buying ad inventory against an NBA game or some other live sporting event, right?
Not so, Qortex CEO and founder Zack Rosenberg told me. According to his company’s internal research, Nike ads actually perform four times better against cooking content than they do against basketball content.
Qortex is a contextual video intelligence platform, although Rosenberg prefers to call it “content alignment,” on the grounds that video performance isn’t always contextually intuitive (see the Nike example!).
The startup launched as CatapultX in late 2020 and was best known for building a series of addressable in-video ad experiences called On-Stream. Over time, however, company leadership realized that the consumer interaction data they’d accrued – over 5 billion interactions, per Rosenberg – could help advertisers better understand what kind of content drives that consumer behavior in the first place.
So CatapultX changed its name to Qortex and pivoted to tracking how video influences audiences, rather than the typical age, gender and geolocation demographics that traditionally dictate ad targeting.
“It’s all about trying to align with the audience that’s consuming the content, and you can only do that if you understand the content,” said Rosenberg.
How it works
Qortex’s video intelligence platform ingests information like a campaign’s objectives and its start and end dates, then offers up the audience segments or content categories that it predicts will perform the best.
But it can also give advertisers feedback on how their video creative will land with certain audiences. Oftentimes, a marketing team will create different versions to reach the same audience, but once they put it through Qortex’s system, they’ll find that each piece of creative actually appeals to a completely different audience than the one they wanted to target, said Rosenberg.
For Coegi, a media agency that specializes in programmatic, search and social advertising, working with Qortex increased the video completion rate for a recent B2B YouTube ad campaign from 14% to 40%.
Originally, Coegi had been placing ads near tech and business news, said Hannah Schatz, the agency’s senior director of programmatic operations. Using Qortex’s technology, however, Coegi found that educational videos about complex topics actually yielded much better performance results.
Working with Qortex allows Coegi to lean into a more content-first approach while still finding the right audience to target, added Chris Kotyck, EVP of digital operations at Coegi.
“We know you think this is the audience, but we’re finding that this sort of segment actually works way better than you might have thought,” said Kotyck, as an example of what he tells clients. “And we can prove it out, and there’s no cost to you, and it’s very straightforward for us to show you that.”
Who it works for
Although On-Stream was originally built for both publishers and advertisers, Qortex now works almost exclusively with the buy-side, which Rosenberg said is because “publishers don’t value their content as much as the brands do.”
The sentiment is ironic, because a lot of publishers have been developing their own contextual intelligence capabilities in recent years. HBO works with Kerv.ai on linking products in shows to shoppable ads, for example, and Fox made contextual advertising one of its major selling points at the Upfronts this year.
But in Rosenberg’s view, publishers tend to be more focused on selling audiences rather than content, which is a problem for two reasons. Firstly, he said, they can’t really dictate demand for audiences in the way that advertisers do. And second, they can’t compete with huge advertising companies like Google or Meta, which have recently been pushing into CTV with their own audience networks.
Rosenberg also made the argument that content consumption behavior is a much more immediate signal than the demographics and geotargeting that typically define audience segments. If a data broker hasn’t updated their profile on a certain consumer, it might not know that consumer recently moved or just had a child within the last few years. But if that consumer is watching a video about how to build a deck, then their plans for the weekend – and the products they might want to buy – are comparatively easier to predict.
“Do I think that audiences in the traditional sense – age, gender, geo, all that stuff – are going to evaporate overnight?” said Rosenberg. “No, but I would argue that it becomes 100 times harder to advertise that way than it does to focus on the content itself.”
Kotyck also said he hopes that contextual and content-focused advertising will lead to better monetization of premium journalism and other forms of content that sometimes suffer as a result of brand-safety measures. And, in other cases, like the complex educational videos that Coegi ended up buying against, it helps monetize high-performing content that would have otherwise gone overlooked because it wasn’t the most intuitive fit.
Not to mention, some TV programs that cater to arguably more valuable niche audiences tend not to be as buzzy or attention-grabbing as more general-audience fare like reality TV. (In the words of “30 Rock” character Jack Donaghy, “I remember when Bravo used to air operas.”)
So, maybe, more content-focused advertising will mean better results for shows that can’t dominate media industry headlines like the latest “Real Housewives” season or the newest Netflix hit.