To date, streaming TV advertising has largely focused on audience targeting—finding the right person. But an audience-only approach fails to live up to one of our industry’s favorite sayings around optimal ad performance: the “right person, right message, at the right time.” Without reaching them at the right moment, even the perfect audience can tune out. 

TV’s unique power lies in its ability to tell emotionally powerful stories. Viewers laugh, cry, and feel suspense—these emotions prime them for the ad that comes next. When an ad aligns with the mood and context of the content, it feels like part of the experience, not an interruption.

Wurl’s case studies show that tapping into this contextual relevance enhances engagement and often doubles or triples conversion rates.

Our in-house scene-level targeting solution provides access to three types of contextual targeting strategies:

• Emotions – Aligns ad to content based on the emotional tone of the scene directly before the ad break (ex: Joy, Anger, Surprise)
• Genre – Targets specific types of content present in a scene (ex: Sports, Travel, Comedy). For example, advertisers can target sports scenes, even if the overall program is not sports-focused.
• Brand Safety – Ensures ads are matched with content that is brand-safe (ex: Profanity, Drugs, War) using IAB-standardized brand safe categories.

Wurl’s scene-level targeting allows you to contextually target CTV ads based on 8 primary emotions, 9 brand safety categories and 30 genres. Emotion segments can also be targeted based on the prevalence of the emotion shown in the content (low, medium, high). All segments can be layered together in infinite combinations. If buying programmatically, check out our Wurl Advertising Catalog page for a list of deal IDs available through third parties.

Wurl’s proprietary system uses a large language model (LLM) to evaluate and classify the dialog, sounds, and imagery of content as it is passed for distribution. The content is automatically assigned a score across emotion, genre, and brand safety. As Wurl identifies the content being streamed, these scores are appended to the content metadata before it is sent to the DSPs, where the segments can then be targeted.

Wurl’s scene-level segments are available through top DSPs, so you can activate within your existing buying workflows. Inventory is available through the open market, and with direct deal support for PMPs and programmatic guaranteed campaigns. Explore Wurl’s available segments and taxonomy in our segment catalog and contact us to get started.