How Content Metadata is Revolutionizing VOD Monetization for Ad Sales Teams

Today’s advertisers and agencies are navigating a fundamental shift as traditional audience targeting, which was once reliant on cookies and third-party data, evolves into contextual targeting. Buyers are no longer satisfied with broad demographics; they are demanding brand-safe, scene-level precision that targets specific themes, moments, and feelings for video on demand (VOD) advertising. This shift is transforming how inventory is valued, moving away from who the viewer is and focusing entirely on the environment they are immersed in. And this move to modern advertising is only possible with a semantic matching layer present to be able to handle the ad auction and understand deep context like tone, emotion, or brand safety in real-time.

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Solving the Content Metadata Problem

Publishers are redefining content metadata and how it is processed to improve the speed, scale, and efficiency of VOD advertising. Traditionally, this data was tucked away for data science and internal marketing teams to power recommendation engines, but it is now being used to supercharge ad sales. Content metadata empowers publishers to enrich content to unlock workflows and value. They accomplish this by using AI to enrich their vast content libraries with metadata tags, summaries, and descriptions with down to frame-level accuracy. 

Each organization is unique, requiring custom tags and content classifiers to be able to search and monetize the most appropriate content in their archives. For example, an athleisure clothing company might have particular definitions for “day-to-night wear” or “yoga chic.” A hotel chain might have particular definitions for “luxury,” “mid-tier,” and “budget-friendly.” Unlocking content archives is mutually beneficial for publishers and advertisers. Ad partners can gain access to granular themes, moments, and scenes that directly relate to their target market and products - such as “eco-friendly family moments.” In the meantime publishers can monetize more of their content, including buried assets that were previously harder to advertise against.

Media companies are tapping into this in order to drive CPM growth and incremental revenue. The new ability to classify their full content inventory makes it possible to present perfect moments that exactly match brand specifications. Over time, this reduces the time and cost of metadata generation and maximizes impact by tuning to each publishers’ domain-specific context.

Companies with petabytes of content struggle with how they can process and prepare their data to be indexed by foundation models. Using the Coactive Content Intelligence stack, companies can tap into proprietary algorithms for state of the art price-performance for both initial and subsequent indexing.

By utilizing Dynamic Tags and advanced processing, publishers can fully understand, search, and monetize their long-tail content through contextual moments. Instead of selling a generic "Drama" category, publishers can now offer specific concepts and themes within a scene. This transition to fully contextual advertising offers the granularity and automation needed to turn previously "unsellable" inventory into premium, searchable moments.

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Monetizing the Full Content Catalog

Once metadata is applied to the entire content catalog, distributors can now automatically bundle content based on specific themes or moods—such as “eco-friendly,” “holiday,” or “women’s empowerment.” This makes it possible to upsell ad blocks that would otherwise remain unsold in an open auction.

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Turning Context into High ROI Ads

While publishers want brand-safe, scene-level themes, moments, and feelings to be able to sell high value ad placements, the current ad sales process is quite different. It relies on manual spreadsheets and institutional knowledge to sell title lists and show sponsorships. The lack of data and granularity leads to last-minute guesses on supply and impressions. Publishers then suffer from low RFP turnaround times of 5-10 days, undersold mid-to-long tail inventory, conservative pricing and guarantees, and high friction between Sales and the Ad Ops teams who have to operationalize ads and content. But some media companies are already simplifying contextual advertising and improving RFP win rates with the help of AI. 

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Top Media Company Wins with Contextual Advertising

A top five global media and streaming company needed to operationalize a net-new, advertiser-defined contextual concept (environmentally conscious) into a sellable, brand-safe ad product for a luxury brand’s campaign. The campaign had strict brand guidelines, needed a quick turnaround, and the brand did not have any off-the-shelf models or taxonomies. 

The media company worked with Coactive to transform an advertiser-defined sustainability concept into a sellable, brand-safe contextual ad product across a 9 million minute content library, resulting in:

• +27% higher enjoyment of the creative vs. baseline
• +14% agreement that surrounding content enhanced the brand’s message
• +10% higher Unaided Brand Awareness vs. baseline
• +38% increase in perception of the luxury brand as environmentally responsible
• +56% higher search engagement vs. competitive streaming
• Retargeted viewers visit the brand’s website nearly 7x more than those not exposed to the ads

The media and streaming company had been hoping to close a deal with this brand over the prior three years. Being able to pinpoint content that met the brand’s criteria was the differentiator that finally finalized the deal. Accurate, nuanced content metadata ensured that they could provide the moments that the luxury brand wanted to be associated with. Across the advertising landscape, being able to tag the full content library and present relevant opportunities to advertising partners is the only way to increase VOD monetization at scale.

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Future-Proofing the Media Ecosystem with Coactive

The shift toward content metadata is more than a technical upgrade—it drives a deep, semantic understanding of content that goes far beyond basic titles or descriptions. By using real-time contextual intelligence, publishers can finally unlock their full VOD libraries currently sitting idle due to a lack of granular data.

The industry can no longer afford the friction of legacy systems and weeks-long RFP cycles. By leveraging automated content metadata, sales teams are replacing manual guesswork with scene-level precision, turning stagnant content into premium inventory. 

Partnering with Coactive provides rich, standardized content metadata so that publishers can turn themes like "Holiday Moments with Hot Chocolate" or "Women Empowerment Stories" into premium, high-yield ad inventory. Publishers can then move beyond the limits of popularity-based sales, using detailed safety labels and thematic bundling. This is the future of VOD monetization: a transparent, privacy-first model that captures the specific moments that truly drive brand connection.

Learn more about how Coactive can help you drive advertising ROI with AI-driven content intelligence.