Wurl Launches BrandDiscovery to Precisely Match Connected TV Ads With the Emotion and Context of Programming in Real Time

March 26, 2024 at 09:00 AM EDT

The GenAI-powered solution provides scene-level contextual targeting to help advertisers align the emotional sentiment of their campaign creatives with content closest to the ad break, improving viewer memorability and engagement

Wurl, a leader in data-driven solutions for CTV, today announced BrandDiscovery – a GenAI-based CTV advertising solution that enables advertisers to align their ads with content in real time. Campaigns targeted with BrandDiscovery allow advertisers to present ads within programming that contextually aligns with their creatives based on emotions, genres, and brand safety – leading to improved brand awareness and purchase intent.

BrandDiscovery’s launch comes at an exciting inflection point for the CTV advertising industry. Television continues to be viewed as a highly effective channel for brand marketers and AI-driven technologies are poised to revolutionize how advertisers connect with their audiences. As the largest video screen and non-skippable environment, CTV is ideal for improving brand awareness – research shows that brand recall and purchase intent is higher for TV and CTV than for digital mobile environments. At the same time, however, media buyers face a fragmented CTV ecosystem, often resulting in a lack of control and transparency, and limiting advertisers’ ability to scale and spend effectively.

“The CTV advertising ecosystem is ripe for disruption,” said Peter Crofut, Vice President of Business Development for Agencies and Brands at Wurl – the company’s newest executive hire brought on to oversee BrandDiscovery’s launch and integration. “When I joined the team here, I was motivated by BrandDiscovery’s potential to lead that disruption and fundamentally change how marketers approach CTV media. We know emotional resonance drives positive attention for brand campaigns, leading to higher brand awareness, recall, and reduced cost per engagement for advertisers. Now, with BrandDiscovery, advertisers will have greater control over the context of their CTV ads, more easily earning the attention of viewers and, as a result, improving measured campaign outcomes.”

BrandDiscovery leverages GenAI to produce emotional resonance between CTV content and campaign creatives. By matching an ad’s emotion with the emotion of the content directly preceding it, brands can generate positive attention.

With BrandDiscovery, advertisers gain:

Scene-level analysis: BrandDiscovery offers contextual targeting at the scene level, an improvement over the industry’s standard program or channel-level solutions. Advertisers can present ads within programming that contextually aligns with their creatives based on emotion, brand safety, and genre.
Contextual targeting at scale: BrandDiscovery ads will be shown across 300+ premium CTV publishers, including FAST channels and leading streamers. With more than 60 billion monthly available ad impressions, Wurl enables advertisers to achieve contextual targeting at scale through a single source of access, providing significant cost and time savings.
Free access: BrandDiscovery data segments are free of charge, and available to advertisers through their SSPs and DSPs.

“At Media.Monks, we’re focused on driving stellar results for our clients,” said Matthew Kramer, Head of Brand Investment at Media.Monks. “We’re excited to partner with Wurl to continue doing just that by introducing their technology to our advertisers, who are already reaping the benefits of BrandDiscovery. During a recent campaign for a financial services client, BrandDiscovery’s emotion targeting led to a 33% lift in aided brand awareness and a 15% lift in purchase intent – exceeding the performance of our CTV campaign strategies. What’s even more promising, the campaign saw a 200% improvement in cost per engagement – as measured by EDO – when the ad creative’s emotions matched the content right before the ad break.”

When compared to KPIs benchmarked for Lending studies over the past five years by Kantar, the results of when Media.Monks applied BrandDiscovery emotions-optimized targeting stood out – performing more than 7X better for aided brand awareness, 4X better for brand favorability, and 2X better for purchase intent.

The Media.Monks campaign – activated through FreeWheel, a global technology platform for the television advertising industry – delivered millions of impressions within a matter of weeks. FreeWheel’s Head of Publisher Sales, Kathy Argyriou, said a critical component to the campaign’s success was being “better able to help advertisers reach their intended audience in premium television environments, fueled by the data sources that matter in today’s ecosystem.”

“In this complex and fast-moving media landscape, this collaboration is another step in tackling some of the most pressing industry challenges, and connecting buyers to premium, brand-safe ad inventory, with transparency and efficiency,” she said. “At FreeWheel, we take very seriously our mission to help fuel greater industry interoperability and our partnership with Wurl is the latest proof point of how we’re putting this philosophy into action.”

BrandDiscovery is available now in North America. Click here to learn more, and get in touch.

About Wurl

Wurl is a leader in the CTV industry, helping connect viewers to the content they want to see with technologies for distribution, monetization, and advertising. The company supports publishers, streamers, and advertisers in growing viewership, maximizing revenue, and strengthening brand value. Wurl is owned by AppLovin (NASDAQ: APP). For more information, visit www.wurl.com.