If you’ve taken a step back from your ad campaigns recently, you might find the landscape looks a little different from what you remember.

The last year hasn’t just brought small tweaks to the advertising industry; it has brought a fundamental shift, driven largely by Artificial Intelligence (AI).

For marketers, this shift is a double-edged sword. On one hand, customer expectations for personalisation are higher than ever. On the other hand, the tools to meet those expectations have become infinitely more powerful.

At Reach, we haven’t just been watching these changes; we’ve been building for them. Here is how the industry has changed and how our latest Mantis AI features allow you to capitalise on it.

1. The Challenge: Finding Audiences in a Cookieless World

• The Shift: Traditional targeting methods are fading. With privacy regulations tightening and third-party cookies disappearing, finding your ideal customer by tracking their online history is becoming increasingly difficult.

• The Reach Solution: We don’t need to track users to find them. Our platform, Mantis, utilises AI-driven Contextual Intelligence (powered by IBM Watson). Instead of guessing who a user is based on old cookies, our AI reads and understands the content they are consuming at this moment. It analyses the topic, nuance, and meaning of a page in real-time.

• The Result: You reach high-intent audiences based on their current interests, achieving 73% higher targeting accuracy than standard tools, without needing a single cookie.

2. The Challenge: “Ad Fatigue” and Content Saturation

• The Shift: Audiences are bombarded with thousands of ads daily. If an ad feels out of place or interrupts a user’s experience, it gets ignored, or worse, creates a negative brand association.

• The Reach Solution: Relevance is about more than just keywords; it’s about emotion. We have integrated sentiment and emotion analysis. Mantis doesn’t just look for words; it identifies the mood of an article. It ensures your ads appear alongside content that is positive and emotionally aligned with your brand, rather than in negative or “unsafe” contexts that standard blocklists miss.

• The Result: Your ads appear in environments where users are actually receptive, driving an average 42% increase in Click-Through Rates (CTR).

3. The Challenge: Measuring What Actually Matters

• The Shift: Vanity metrics (like simple “impressions”) are out. In a tighter economy, every marketing pound spent needs to prove it wasn’t just “seen,” but that it drove value.

• The Reach Solution: We’ve moved from “Brand Safety” (blocking everything) to “Smart Suitability.” Traditional tools overblock content, wasting your budget and limiting your reach. Our AI understands nuance, distinguishing between a “shooting star” (safe) and a “shooting” (unsafe), unlocking premium inventory that competitors block.

• The Result: You stop wasting budget on false alarms and start spending efficiently, maximising your ROI by accessing safe, high-quality inventory that others miss.

Ready to see these tools in action?

The industry has changed, and so have we. If you haven’t worked with Reach recently, you are missing out on the most powerful versions of our advertising solutions yet. Complete the form below to speak to one of our experts.