Contextual marketing is online advertising placed and appearing according to how relevant it is to the content the consumer is viewing in response to a search. It is targeted advertising that looks to align with the interests of a web surfer.

Google AdSense is the most popular form of contextual marketing. A search engine bot, known as Mediabot, indexes the material on a website and determines which advertisements submitted to Google are a match. Search engines, including Yahoo! and Microsoft, display advertisements on search results pages. Those advertisements are selected based on the key words that a person enters into the search engine.

The idea of contextual marketing has been controversial because critics claim it represents an invasion of privacy. In 1999, when the search marketing company DoubleClick (now owned by Google) attempted to use the information it had collected online about consumers to create targeted promotions offline, the corporation was taken to court over its privacy policies. Public reaction led online marketers to focus on delivering marketing messages that drive responses without being intrusive.

Origin

Contextual marketing is based on the idea of personal profiling, where information about web surfers is collected via cookies. In 1995, permanent cookie technology was invented, which allowed servers to send packets of information to web browsers, and vice versa, in order to track the websites visited by the person at the computer.

Participatory advertising is the idea of co-creation, where a marketer introduces a concept to the public and then asks consumers to use their creativity to expand upon that idea.

Corporations reach out to brand evangelists to ask them to create commercials or new brand messages for products they love. The user-generated content is then uploaded to brand-specific websites or video-sharing sites like YouTube. By yielding brand control, companies like MasterCard and Converse have managed to engage customers in promotion across social networks.

Participatory advertising also involves the changing manner in which people consume marketing. Instead, customers are now interacting with brand campaigns, as the Internet has moved marketers away from traditional, static methods of advertising. Under this methodology, consumers are no longer willing to passively digest product information, but instead want to form a connection with a brand. In a recent successful example, Dove leveraged this approach with the Campaign for Real Beauty, which asks consumers to help change stereotypical ideals of beauty. 

Origin:

The first examples of participatory advertising were seen in the early 1990's as Nike parlayed a series of advertisements with Michael Jordan and Bugs Bunny into the creation of a feature-length cartoon, "Space Jam." Advertising evolved into a participatory model with the introduction of the Internet and a corresponding change in consumer culture.