Qortex: Nike ads perform 4x better against cooking content than NBA games
Qortex CEO Zack Rosenberg says the company's internal research found Nike ads perform four times better against cooking content than against NBA basketball content, the kind of pairing a media planner would rarely test on instinct. Qortex, which launched as CatapultX in 2020 and built an addressable in-video ad product called On-Stream, has since pivoted to tracking how video content itself influences viewer behavior, drawing on more than 5 billion consumer interactions the platform has logged. Media agency Coegi applied Qortex's system to a B2B YouTube campaign and moved its placements from tech and business news to educational videos about complex topics, lifting video completion rate from 14% to 40%, according to Coegi senior director of programmatic operations Hannah Schatz.
Planners who default to buying against the most obvious contextual environment, sports for a sneaker brand, news for a B2B tech product, may be leaving performance on the table that content-first testing would catch. Qortex's platform ingests a campaign's objectives and flight dates, then recommends content categories and can flag when different creative cuts intended for the same audience actually resonate with different viewers entirely. Rosenberg argues traditional demographic targeting, age, gender, geolocation, will keep losing ground to content signals as data brokers struggle to keep profiles current: "I would argue that it becomes 100 times harder to advertise that way than it does to focus on the content itself." Qortex currently sells almost exclusively to the buy side, since Rosenberg says publishers undervalue their own content relative to what brands are willing to pay for the right alignment.