Lazada Leverages AI-Powered Contextual Video Advertising to Assure Product Authenticity

It is very important for an e-commerce brand to win the trust of its consumers regarding the authenticity and genuineness of the products it offers. Without this trust, an eCommerce platform cannot meet its sales target.

Lazada, a Singapore-based multinational e-commerce company, wanted to promote its sub-brand LazMall through YouTube advertising while assuring people of full authenticity and genuineness of LazMall’s products. LazMall is the largest virtual mall in the Southeast Asia region. It offers products from more than eighteen thousand brands both international and local. It enables brands and sellers to directly engage with consumers and provide a customized experience to them.

As Lazada wanted to promote LazMall and at the same time assure people of one hundred percent authenticity of its products, it required granular targeting of different groups of audiences on YouTube for different products such as home and lifestyle, electronics, sports, fashion, health, and beauty, etc. in a single YouTube ad targeting campaign, and connecting with YouTube viewers at those contextual moments when they were very likely to engage with the ads.

In order to target YouTube viewers at the most contextually relevant video moments, Lazada leveraged the AI-powered in-video context detection platform, Mirrors, developed by Silverpush. Mirrors works by detecting contexts such as logos, objects, faces, actions, etc. in videos in order to serve the most contextually relevant ads.

For delivering lifestyle and fashion-related brand communication, Mirrors’ face detection technology identified YouTube videos featuring famous celebrities, popular influencers, and well-known bloggers. Through its logo detection capability, Mirrors identified videos featuring competing e-commerce platforms such as Shopee and brands across different categories such as Procter & Gamble. It then communicated contextually relevant messages from Lazada during moments when video viewers were highly receptive and likely to engage.

Mirrors’ YouTube contextual targeting technology-enabled Lazada to connect with viewers during their product discovery and buying moments by identifying actions in videos such as tours of stores, unboxing of products, etc.

The results of the Mirrors-powered YouTube video ads campaign were excellent with a twenty-five percent higher view-through rate and forty percent higher click-through rate than corresponding benchmarks. The use of Mirrors also prevented ad waste unlike blanket targeting advertising approaches.

By using Silverpush’s AI-powered contextual video advertising technology, Lazada was able to effectively emphasize the authenticity of its products during the key contextual moments when consumers were most receptive to the brand’s communication.