AdTech Collective by Seedtag
News, trends, and insights in Digital Advertising
Most brands still treat a cultural moment like a single event. A topic trends, a campaign gets built around the headline, and by the time it launches, the conversation has already moved on.
Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce's wedding is a perfect example, not because of the ceremony itself, but because of everything that happened around it. Long before any official details were confirmed, the internet had already transformed it into dozens of interconnected conversations spanning fashion, sports, celebrity media, luxury, and fandom.
That gap between how brands plan and how culture actually moves is one of the most overlooked trends in advertising today.
To better understand it, Seedtag’s LAB Insights team mapped the online conversation using Liz, our proprietary Neuro-Contextual AI. What emerged went far beyond one couple or one weekend. It revealed how cultural moments evolve across connected interests, emotions, and intent, and why real-time marketing built around a single keyword rarely captures the full opportunity.
The timing couldn't be more relevant. As brands continue to invest in video ads, generative AI, and short-form content, the race to respond to cultural moments is only accelerating. But speed alone doesn't solve the core challenge. Most campaigns built around viral moments still capture only a fraction of the conversation because they're not designed to follow where attention actually goes.
Key Takeaways
- Cultural moments rarely unfold as a single story. They spread across interconnected clusters of interest, emotion, and intent.
- Speculation often generates more sustained engagement than the confirmed event itself, making anticipation a marketing opportunity in its own right.
- Audiences move fluidly between fashion, sports, entertainment, and lifestyle, while many marketing strategies still treat these as separate categories.
- Brand mentions and fashion signals emerge early, creating valuable windows for brand recognition long before mainstream coverage catches up.
- Understanding conversations at the cluster level, rather than the headline level, turns viral moments into smarter, data-driven marketing strategies.
What Hidden Advertising Trends Do Brands Miss When a Cultural Moment Goes Viral?
Most marketing teams still approach cultural moments as a single spike in attention. A story breaks, interest rises, then fades, and campaigns are built to capture that one wave.
Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce's wedding shows why that model leaves value on the table.
Using Liz, we identified more than 2,160 topic nodes grouped into seven distinct contextual clusters. This wasn't one conversation. It was seven overlapping narratives, each with its own audience, emotional tone, and commercial relevance.
Two of those clusters, Swiftie Speculations and Entertainment Press, each represented roughly 30% of the entire graph. Long before the ceremony took place, conversations around celebrity NDAs, venue rumors, family connections, and media speculation were already driving enormous engagement.
The biggest marketing opportunity isn't the cultural moment itself. It's everything happening before, around, and beyond it.
The build-up consistently attracts more sustained attention than the event itself, and it expands across categories that have little to do with the obvious topic. A wedding quickly becomes a conversation about fashion, sports, music, luxury, celebrity media, and fandom, each creating its own emotional context and commercial opportunity.
Why Do Traditional Marketers Fail to Catch Emerging Advertising Trends Related to Internet Subcultures?
One of today's fastest-moving advertising trends is the growing influence of internet subcultures on mainstream conversations. Yet traditional marketing strategy still plans around categories like sports, entertainment, and fashion as if audiences move between them in predictable ways.
They don't. Internet communities connect topics organically, creating conversations that cross industries, audiences, and platforms.
Swifties are a perfect example.
Throughout the weeks leading up to the wedding, fans treated every rumor, clue, and unconfirmed detail as meaningful. Liz's contextual graph surfaced clusters filled with themes like superfans, theories, itineraries, and speculation, sitting alongside entertainment journalism and celebrity news coverage.
The conversation wasn't driven by confirmed information. It was driven by curiosity.
Brands focused exclusively on official news coverage would have missed where engagement was actually happening.
A second cluster told a parallel story.
Taylor Swift's music career and Travis Kelce's NFL season evolved side by side, connecting music, sports, celebrity culture, and personal relationships into a single narrative. Rather than one audience absorbing the other, two powerful communities expanded the conversation together.
For marketers, that's the real lesson. Consumer behavior doesn't follow category boundaries. It follows relevance.
Understanding those connections requires data-driven marketing strategies capable of following conversations as they evolve, rather than waiting for headlines to define them.
One Moment, Many Conversations
This is where many marketing strategies fall short.
Marketers often build campaigns around the trending keyword, assuming audiences experience culture through a single topic.
They don't.
People move naturally between interests, emotions, and intent, following whichever thread feels most relevant in the moment.
Fashion became one of the earliest signals in this example.
Before most official details emerged, guest photos, designer speculation, and luxury brand mentions had already formed one of the densest contextual clusters within Liz's graph.
Dior quickly became associated with the wedding dress, while Artifex attracted attention for the engagement ring. Rather than supporting the main story, these brands became part of it, generating their own conversations driven by admiration, aspiration, and curiosity.
This is real-time marketing at its best.
Fashion isn't simply an extension of a cultural moment. It's often one of the first places where brand recognition accelerates because audiences are already emotionally invested.
Secrecy became another conversation entirely.
Once speculation focused on Madison Square Garden, discussions around guest lists, venue security, the 34th Street shutdown, and celebrity NDAs exploded across media and social platforms.
Much of the engagement wasn't fueled by confirmed information. It was fueled by anticipation.
That anticipation spread especially well through short-form video, where audiences actively searched for updates, theories, and behind-the-scenes clues rather than polished explanations.
More importantly, it demonstrates a broader advertising trend.
People don't wait for the headline. They engage with everything leading up to it.
Why Marketers Miss These Connected Conversations
Traditional media planning still tends to organize campaigns by category. Sports content is bought as sports. Entertainment is bought as entertainment. Fashion is treated as its own world.
But audiences don't experience culture that way.
They move seamlessly between conversations, following the stories, emotions, and communities that matter most to them.
Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce's wedding showed exactly that.
Swifties didn't simply overlap with NFL fans. Together, they created an entirely new conversation that neither audience could have generated alone. Music, sports, celebrity culture, and lifestyle became part of the same cultural moment, creating fresh opportunities for brands that understood how those interests connected.
The emotional signals driving that conversation were equally revealing.
Admiration, anticipation, excitement, and joy weren't attached to one topic. They flowed naturally across multiple contextual clusters as audiences followed every new development.
That's why campaigns built around a single category often miss the moment when engagement is at its highest.
Audience intent doesn't follow media plans. It follows connected conversations.
And understanding those conversations is becoming one of the defining advertising trends shaping modern marketing strategy.
The Marketing Lesson: Understanding Before Reacting
Reacting quickly to a cultural moment is no longer enough.
The real advantage comes from understanding how that moment evolves before, during, and after it captures mainstream attention.
This is where Neuro-Contextual Intelligence changes the equation.
Rather than relying on personal data or assumptions about who audiences are, our Neuro-Contextual AI, Liz, interprets signals of interest, emotion, and intent directly from the content people are engaging with across the open web.
Applied to Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce's wedding, Liz identified more than 2,160 topic nodes connected across seven contextual clusters, revealing not just where attention existed, but how it moved between fashion, sports, entertainment, luxury, fandom, and celebrity media.
Instead of reducing the event to a single headline or keyword, the graph exposed an ecosystem of interconnected conversations.
That's the principle behind Neuro-Contextual Advertising.
Rather than treating a cultural moment as a single media opportunity, it enables brands to understand the wider context surrounding it, helping them align with the emotions, interests, and intent driving engagement in real time.
Because understanding audiences means understanding how conversations evolve, not simply what they're talking about at any given moment.
What This Means for Marketing Strategy
The pace of digital culture continues to accelerate.
Marketers are investing more in generative AI, content creation, short-form video, and social media campaigns to respond faster to emerging trends. Those investments matter.
But speed alone isn't enough.
The brands that create meaningful connections won't necessarily be the ones publishing first.
They'll be the ones who understand where attention is moving before everyone else does.
That requires looking beyond headlines and trending keywords to see the broader patterns shaping consumer behavior.
Cultural moments don't belong to a single audience, a single platform, or a single category.
They're built from dozens of interconnected conversations unfolding simultaneously across the open web.
Understanding those connections is quickly becoming one of the most important competitive advantages in modern marketing.
The Advertising Trend That Actually Matters
The next defining cultural moment won't belong to the brands that react the fastest. It'll belong to the brands that understand how conversations spread.
Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce's wedding is simply one example.
Tomorrow's defining moment could be the Super Bowl, the Oscars, a World Cup final, or an unexpected viral trend. The event will change, but the pattern won't.
Cultural moments don't unfold through a single conversation. They spread across interconnected interests, emotions, and behaviors.
For marketers, that's the advertising trend that matters most. The brands that learn to understand those connections won't just keep up with culture. They'll be ready to move with it.
For years, the advertising industry has debated the merits of the open web vs. walled gardens.
The conversation usually centers on scale, targeting, reach, and performance. Which environment offers better audiences? Which delivers stronger results? Which deserves a greater share of media investment?
Those questions still matter. But they are no longer the only ones.
As signal loss and fragmentation continue to reshape advertising, and AI plays a larger role in planning and activation, a more important question is emerging:
Where can advertisers operate with genuine transparency?
The industry has spent years optimizing around demographics, identifiers, and behavioral signals. But those approaches were built for a different era. As privacy regulations reshape how user data can be collected and activated, many of the assumptions that defined digital advertising are being challenged.
More importantly, people have never been as simple as the systems built to reach them.
A 35-year-old woman, married, in a dual-income household with two children under ten, is not an audience. She might be researching sustainable travel after work. Comparing mortgage options. Reading about marathon training. Planning a family vacation.
The demographic label remains the same. The context, motivations, emotions, and intent behind each moment do not.
This is why the future of advertising is not simply about finding new ways to identify people. It is about developing a better understanding of the moments that shape attention and decision-making.
And it is why the conversation around open web vs walled gardens is evolving into something larger. Not a debate about channels. A conversation about transparency, understanding, and how advertising creates relevance in a privacy-first world.
Key Takeaways
- The debate around open web vs walled gardens is evolving from audience access to transparency and accountability.
- Traditional targeting methods built around demographics and identifiers are becoming less effective in a privacy-first advertising landscape.
- Advertisers need greater visibility into how campaigns are planned, activated, and measured across media environments.
- The open web provides transparency, independent measurement, and contextual intelligence that help brands understand audiences beyond demographic profiles.
- Unified Ad Platforms and End-to-End Platforms simplify activation but also raise important questions around visibility and verification.
- The future of advertising will depend on balancing scale, transparency, and a deeper understanding of human attention.
Open Web vs Walled Gardens: Why the Debate Still Matters
Both walled gardens and the open web play an important role in modern digital advertising.
Walled gardens, including platforms operated by major tech giants, provide access to large logged-in audiences, rich first-party user data, and highly integrated advertising products. Their scale and simplicity have made them a cornerstone of many media strategies.
The open web offers a different advantage.
It provides access to a diverse ecosystem of premium publishers, content environments, and independent technology partners. Rather than operating inside a single closed platform, advertisers can activate campaigns across a broad range of trusted environments where consumers actively engage with content.
This distinction matters because the way people consume media continues to evolve.
Consumers spend their time across multiple channels, devices, and content experiences. They move seamlessly between social platforms, streaming services, publisher websites, mobile apps, and connected TV.
The question is no longer whether advertisers should choose the open web or walled gardens. The real question is how each environment contributes to a broader media strategy.
Why Transparency Matters More Than Ever
As the industry evolves, transparency is emerging as one of the most important considerations for advertisers.
For years, digital advertising benefited from an abundance of user-level signals. Audience targeting became increasingly sophisticated, allowing brands to reach consumers based on demographics, interests, and online behaviors.
Today, that landscape is changing.
Privacy regulations continue to reshape data collection practices. Browser restrictions limit access to traditional identifiers. Consumers expect greater control over how their information is used.
At the same time, AI-powered systems are increasingly responsible for planning, activation, optimization, and measurement decisions.
This creates a new challenge.
There is still an enormous amount of data available. But there is often less visibility into how that data is interpreted and transformed into campaign decisions.
As automation increases, advertisers need confidence not only in outcomes but in the processes that generate those outcomes.
Transparency is no longer simply a reporting feature. It is becoming a strategic advantage.
Demographics Oversimplify People
The shift toward privacy-first advertising is also changing how marketers think about audiences.
For decades, advertising strategies have relied heavily on demographic segmentation:
- Age
- Gender
- Income
- Location
These signals can be useful, but they provide only a partial view of human behavior.
Two people with identical demographic profiles may have completely different motivations depending on the content they are consuming and the context surrounding that moment.
A parent reading about summer travel plans is in a different moment than that same person consuming breaking news. A sports fan researching match statistics has different intentions than when browsing home improvement content.
Demographics describe people. They do not explain moments. This is where Neuro-Contextual intelligence is becoming increasingly valuable.
Rather than focusing exclusively on who someone is, our Neuro-Contextual AI can help advertisers understand what matters to people in a specific moment by analyzing signals related to content, interest, emotion, and intent.
Because relevance is not only about identity. It is also about context.
Why Premium Advertisers Are Re-Evaluating Ad Spend
The shift in ad spend toward the open web is not driven by a single trend. It reflects a broader change in how brands evaluate media investments.
Advertisers increasingly want greater transparency into campaign performance, inventory quality, and measurement methodologies. They want to understand where ads appear, how decisions are made, and whether results can be independently validated.
The open web provides access to premium publisher environments where consumers actively engage with trusted content.
It also allows advertisers to work with a wider range of measurement and verification partners, creating additional visibility throughout the campaign lifecycle.
This does not mean brands are abandoning walled gardens. Far from it.
Many advertisers continue to rely on closed platforms for scale, activation, and performance marketing objectives.
However, they are increasingly seeking a balance between the efficiency of walled gardens and the transparency offered by the open web.
What Are Unified Ad Platforms and End-to-End Platforms?
Alongside traditional walled gardens, another trend is reshaping digital advertising: the rise of Unified Ad Platforms (UAPs) and End-to-End Platforms.
These solutions bring multiple functions, including planning, activation, data management, optimization, and measurement, into a single platform.
The appeal is clear. One workflow. One technology stack. One operational environment.
For many advertisers, these platforms simplify campaign execution and reduce complexity.
However, they also introduce an important consideration.
When planning, activation, optimization, and reporting all occur within the same ecosystem, advertisers may have fewer opportunities to independently verify how decisions are being made.
This does not make End-to-End Platforms inherently problematic. They solve real operational challenges.
But as automation and AI become more influential, advertisers must consider how much visibility they retain into the systems guiding campaign performance.
The question is not whether these platforms create value. The question is how transparency and accountability evolve within increasingly automated environments.
Understanding the Moment, Not Just the User
This is where the conversation ultimately moves beyond open web vs walled gardens.
The future of advertising is not simply about finding audiences. It is about understanding people. Not as demographic categories. Not as identifiers. Not as data points. But as individuals navigate thousands of moments throughout their day.
Modern contextual AI can help advertisers understand those moments by analyzing the content people engage with and identifying signals related to interest, emotion, and intent.
This creates a privacy-first approach to advertising that does not depend on personal identifiers to deliver relevance.
This philosophy powers our Neuro-Contextual intelligence.
Through Liz, our proprietary Neuro-contextual AI, we analyze content across premium publisher environments to understand the context surrounding every advertising opportunity.
Because meaningful advertising starts with understanding. Not just who people are. But what matters to them in the moment.
Looking Ahead
The future of advertising is unlikely to be defined by a single environment.
Walled gardens will continue to play an important role, particularly where first-party relationships and logged-in audiences create value. The open web will continue to provide transparency, flexibility, and access to premium content environments where attention naturally happens.
The more important question is not where advertisers spend every dollar.
It is whether they have enough visibility to understand why those investments work.
As media planning becomes increasingly influenced by AI, fragmented signals, and privacy-first frameworks, transparency is becoming more than a reporting feature.
It is becoming a competitive advantage.
The brands that succeed will not simply optimize for reach. They will optimize for understanding. Understanding the content. Understanding the context. And understanding the moments that shape how people think, feel, and act.
The FIFA World Cup 2026 will generate an unprecedented volume of attention across digital media. For automotive brands, that scale creates enormous opportunity but also a significant challenge: standing out in an environment where every advertiser competes for the same audience.
The difference between visibility and impact comes down to understanding intent. Not every football fan is equally receptive to a brand message, and not every page view signals genuine engagement.
During major sporting events, audiences move between match coverage, transfer rumors, national team narratives, player stories, entertainment content, and countless adjacent interests. Within those moments lie valuable signals that can help brands identify when consumers are most open to engagement.
The question is no longer how to reach World Cup audiences. It is about identifying the moments when attention becomes meaningful engagement.
Below, we explore the audience insights shaping fan behavior during the tournament and how automotive brands can use Neuro-Contextual advertising to transform World Cup attention into meaningful consideration.
Key Takeaways
- The difference between a browser and an engaged consumer often lies in intent signals, not audience segments.
- World Cup audiences engage with far more than football, creating valuable opportunities across adjacent interests and passion points.
- Emotions such as excitement, curiosity, admiration, and optimism play a key role in how fans engage with content throughout the tournament.
- Neuro-Contextual advertising goes beyond keywords and categories to align messaging with interests, emotions, and intent.
- Dynamic creative optimization allows automotive campaigns to adapt in real time around tournament moments, audience context, and sentiment.
The Gap Between Looking and Engaging
Scale is not the challenge. During a World Cup, automotive brands can reach millions of consumers across the open web, connected TV, and streaming environments.
The challenge is identifying the difference between someone casually consuming content and someone demonstrating signals of genuine engagement.
Traditional targeting approaches often rely on keywords, categories, or broad audience segments. A page mentions "SUVs" or "electric vehicles," and an ad is served. While these signals can provide relevance, they do not always reveal what matters most: what the consumer is thinking, feeling, or looking for in that moment.
A reader exploring vehicle reviews out of curiosity may require a very different message from someone actively comparing models ahead of a purchase. Understanding that distinction helps brands move beyond simple reach and toward meaningful engagement.
Where Fan Attention Really Goes
One of the biggest misconceptions about the World Cup is that fans spend the tournament focused exclusively on football.
In reality, audience attention extends across a much broader ecosystem of content.
Audience interest also evolves throughout the tournament. Our insights show that engagement increases significantly during key moments such as the group stage, quarter-finals, and high-tension knockout rounds. Importantly, some of the largest spikes are driven not only by match results but also by player narratives, rivalries, and stories surrounding the competition.
Football-related interests such as domestic leagues, transfer rumors, national team stories, and club rivalries remain major drivers of engagement. But fans also spend time consuming content connected to celebrity culture, motorsports, entertainment, lifestyle topics, and national identity narratives.
These adjacent interests are not distractions from football fandom. They are part of how fans experience the tournament.
For automotive marketers, this creates additional opportunities to connect with audiences in contexts that may be less crowded than traditional sports environments while still maintaining strong relevance to fan interests.
Understanding these passion points allows brands to expand beyond match-day targeting and build a more comprehensive view of where their audiences spend time and attention.
The Emotional Signals Behind Engagement
The World Cup is not only a media event. It is an emotional one.
Across markets, football content generates a range of emotional responses, including excitement, curiosity, admiration, optimism, and even sadness. These emotions shift throughout the tournament as audiences react to victories, defeats, player performances, speculation, and national narratives.
While excitement consistently emerges as one of the strongest drivers of engagement, emotional responses vary across markets. Some audiences gravitate toward stories of national pride and sporting heroes, while others engage more deeply with tournament speculation, player narratives, or broader cultural conversations surrounding the event. Understanding these nuances can help brands deliver more relevant messaging throughout the competition.
For automotive brands, these signals offer valuable context. The emotions that shape engagement during the tournament can also influence how consumers respond to brand messaging, particularly in categories where consideration and aspiration play an important role.
Many vehicle purchase journeys are influenced by emotional factors alongside practical considerations. Curiosity about new technology, optimism about future ownership, excitement around a new model, and aspiration tied to lifestyle choices all play a role in consideration.
When brands understand the emotional context surrounding content consumption, they can align messaging more effectively with the consumer's interests, emotions, and intent in that moment.
How the Neuro-Contextual Approach Changes Automotive Marketing
Industry-standard targeting often relies on predefined content taxonomies and broad category classifications. Neuro-contextual approaches take a different path by analyzing content more deeply to understand interests, emotions, and intent signals in real time.
The difference between targeting a broad automotive category and identifying audiences such as Family Upgraders, First-Time Car Buyers, Urban Drivers, or Off-Road Adventure Enthusiasts is significant.
Rather than focusing solely on what content someone is consuming, Neuro-Contextual intelligence helps brands understand why that content matters to them.
For automotive marketers, this means identifying environments where signals of curiosity, optimism, excitement, and consideration are already present and aligning messaging accordingly.
The goal is not simply to be present. It is to be relevant.
Dynamic Creative That Moves With the Tournament
The World Cup unfolds in phases, and audience behavior evolves with it.
Interest levels rise during key matches, emotional intensity increases during knockout rounds, and fan conversations shift as new narratives emerge.
The content driving engagement during the group stage may be very different from the stories capturing attention during the quarter-finals or final, making flexibility a critical advantage for advertisers.
Creative should evolve alongside those changes.
Dynamic Creative Optimization (DCO) allows campaigns to adapt messaging based on factors such as tournament stage, location, time of day, weather conditions, and emotional sentiment.
A message delivered during a high-tension quarter-final may require a different creative approach than one served during the group stage. Likewise, audiences engaging with family-focused content may respond differently than audiences consuming performance or technology-related content.
By aligning creative with context, brands can create more relevant experiences throughout the tournament.
Measuring What Actually Matters
Clicks and viewability remain useful metrics, but they do not tell the full story.
For automotive brands operating within long and consideration-heavy purchase journeys, understanding campaign impact requires a broader measurement framework.
Attention metrics help reveal whether advertising was genuinely processed by consumers. Brand lift studies can demonstrate shifts in awareness, perception, and consideration. Incremental reach helps determine whether campaigns are connecting with new audiences rather than repeatedly reaching the same users.
Together, these measurements provide a clearer view of how campaigns influence consumer behavior throughout the World Cup journey.
From Research to the Road
The FIFA World Cup 2026 presents a unique convergence of attention, emotion, and engagement.
Success will not belong solely to the brands with the largest budgets or the widest reach. It will belong to those who understand where fan attention is going, what emotions are driving engagement, and how to identify moments of genuine intent.
Traditional research helps identify the audience. Neuro-contextual intelligence helps identify the moment.
And during the world's biggest sporting event, that difference can determine whether a campaign is simply seen or truly remembered.
To learn more about the audience insights, emotional signals, and activation opportunities shaping FIFA World Cup 2026 campaigns, download the full Automotive Insights report.
Every year, the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity offers a glimpse into where advertising is heading next. But in 2025, the conversations across the Croisette felt especially revealing.
At the heart of Cannes Lions 2025 was a growing realization that the future of advertising will depend less on identifying audiences and more on understanding people. Across beachfront stages, private dinners, podcast studios, and conversations inside the Palais des Festivals, the industry repeatedly returned to the same challenge: how can brands create more relevant experiences in an increasingly fragmented, AI-driven media landscape?
For Seedtag, Cannes 2025 became an important moment to help shape that conversation.
Throughout the week, Seedtag explored how Neuro-Contextual Advertising is redefining the relationship between media, creativity, and human understanding. From discussions around AI and emotional relevance to debates about journalism, contextual intelligence, and audience mindset, the company’s presence reflected a broader industry shift already reshaping modern advertising.
And now, as the industry prepares for another year in Cannes, France, those conversations are evolving even further.
Key Takeaways
- The Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity highlighted the industry’s move from audience profiling toward deeper human understanding.
- Cannes Lions 2025 conversations focused heavily on AI, contextual relevance, emotional engagement, and privacy-first advertising.
- Seedtag’s Neuro-Contextual approach emerged as part of a broader industry shift toward understanding interest, emotion, and intent.
- Creativity, media, and data became increasingly interconnected across the Cannes Lions International Festival.
- New discussions heading into Cannes 2026 are expanding beyond targeting and toward adaptive, human-aware advertising experiences.
What Cannes Lions 2025 Revealed About Advertising
The International Festival of Creativity has always reflected the priorities of the advertising industry. In 2025, those priorities shifted noticeably.
Artificial intelligence dominated discussions across nearly every stage and meeting space. But while AI remained central, the industry conversation matured significantly compared to previous years. The focus was no longer simply on automation or content generation. Instead, marketers increasingly questioned how technology can help advertising become more meaningful, more adaptive, and more emotionally aligned with people.
That tension defined much of Cannes Lions 2025.
Consumers today move fluidly between streaming platforms, creator ecosystems, social content, sports, commerce, and live cultural moments. Attention is fragmented, audience behavior changes constantly, and traditional identity-based targeting models are becoming less effective in a privacy-first world.
As a result, the industry is beginning to rethink what relevance actually means.
For us at Seedtag, that conversation connected directly to Neuro-Contextual Advertising. Rather than relying on static audience profiles or demographic assumptions, our approach focuses on understanding real-time signals of interest, emotion, and intent across the open web and premium media environments.
The idea is simple: people are more than profiles.
And increasingly, the advertising industry is starting to agree.
From Profiles to Passions
One of the defining conversations during Cannes 2025 centered on the limitations of traditional targeting.
For years, digital advertising has relied heavily on demographic segmentation and behavioral assumptions. But across the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity, industry leaders repeatedly discussed the need to move beyond identity alone and focus more deeply on audience mindset, context, and motivation.
We explored this shift directly during the live crossover episode of AdTech Heroes x The Pub Way, hosted at The Drum’s podcast studio.
The conversation brought together leaders from across media, creative, and advertising to discuss how brands can better engage audiences through real-time understanding rather than static assumptions.
A recurring theme emerged quickly: marketers have spent years trying to understand who consumers are, while paying far less attention to why they engage in the first place.
That distinction matters.
People are shaped by passions, interests, emotions, and cultural moments that evolve continuously. Someone watching sports content during a major tournament may not respond to messaging the same way they would while reading financial news or consuming entertainment content later in the day.
Context changes mindset.
This idea became central to many discussions throughout the Cannes Lions International Festival. Relevance is no longer about reaching the right demographic. It is about understanding the emotional and cognitive environment surrounding attention itself.
AI Became About Understanding, Not Just Automation
AI remained one of the dominant themes across Cannes, France, but the industry conversation evolved significantly compared to previous years.
Earlier conversations around AI often focused on speed, scale, and automation. At Cannes Lions 2025, the emphasis shifted toward intelligence, adaptability, and human understanding.
Marketers are now asking more complex questions. How can AI help interpret the audience mindset? How can it improve contextual relevance? How can it support creativity without reducing advertising to generic automation?
These discussions appeared repeatedly across panels, roundtables, and private conversations.
Our perspective centered on the idea that AI should not simply optimize delivery. It should help brands better understand the moments in which people engage with content.
This is where Neuro-Contextual Advertising becomes increasingly relevant.
By combining neuroscience principles with AI-powered contextual understanding, Liz, our Neuo-Contextual AI, is designed to interpret signals of interest, emotion, and intent in real time. The goal is not to identify individuals, but to understand the meaning surrounding the moment itself.
That approach reflects a larger shift happening across the industry.
Advertising is moving away from static targeting systems and toward adaptive environments capable of responding dynamically to changing emotional and contextual signals.
Creativity and Context Are Becoming Reconnected
Another major theme across the Palais des Festivals was the growing relationship between creativity and contextual relevance.
For years, programmatic advertising has often separated creative storytelling from media strategy. But at Cannes Lions 2025, many industry leaders argued that creativity can no longer function independently from context and audience understanding.
As media environments become increasingly fragmented, brands face growing pressure to create campaigns that feel synchronized with the emotional tone surrounding the content experience.
This is especially important across premium video, streaming, and creator-driven ecosystems where audiences expect advertising to feel more integrated and less disruptive.
Throughout the week, conversations increasingly focused on how creative effectiveness improves when messaging aligns with the real-time audience mindset.
That shift is transforming how marketers think about personalization itself.
Rather than personalizing around identity, advertisers are beginning to personalize around context, emotion, and intent.
This idea also appeared in conversations surrounding contextual TV, curated supply, and premium media environments. Brands are looking for advertising experiences that feel more thoughtful, more emotionally aware, and more aligned with the content moments consumers actively choose to engage with.
Journalism, Trust, and Smarter Contextual Understanding
Beyond AI and creativity, Cannes Lions 2025 also highlighted growing industry concerns around journalism, trust, and responsible monetization.
We participated in discussions exploring how rigid keyword blocklists and simplistic brand safety systems can unintentionally harm quality journalism.
This became an important conversation across the International Festival of Creativity because advertisers increasingly recognize that brand safety cannot rely exclusively on broad exclusions or outdated contextual assumptions.
High-quality journalism covering politics, climate, economics, or global conflict often becomes demonetized despite offering trusted, premium environments for advertisers.
That creates a difficult contradiction for the media ecosystem.
The solution discussed throughout Cannes 2025 was not abandoning brand safety altogether, but evolving toward more intelligent contextual systems capable of understanding nuance, tone, and meaning more effectively.
This conversation reinforced one of the industry’s broader shifts: context is becoming more sophisticated.
Modern contextual understanding is no longer limited to keywords alone. It increasingly depends on a deeper interpretation of emotional tone, audience mindset, and environmental relevance.
Looking Ahead to Cannes Lions 2026
As the industry prepares for the next Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity, many of the conversations that defined 2025 are continuing to evolve.
This year, we will expand those discussions further at La Perle, our Cannes space designed for meetings, collaborative sessions, workshops, and thought leadership conversations.
The upcoming agenda reflects many of the themes that emerged throughout Cannes Lions 2025.
Sessions such as “The End of Guesswork: How to Reach Consumers Who Are Actually Ready to Listen” will explore how advertisers can move beyond stale targeting proxies and align campaigns with real-time emotion, interest, and intent.
Other conversations will focus on curated supply, contextual TV, AI and creativity, neuroscience, media responsibility, and human-centered advertising experiences.
We will also introduce experiential activations such as the “Scent of Context” lab, an immersive workshop designed to explore how emotion, memory, and sensory environments shape contextual understanding.
Together, these experiences reflect a broader evolution happening across advertising itself.
The industry is no longer asking only how to target people more efficiently. It is asking how to better understand the emotional and cognitive moments that shape attention.
From Profiles to Human Understanding
Looking back, Cannes Lions 2025 represented more than another industry gathering. It reflected a meaningful turning point in how advertising thinks about relevance.
AI became more mature. Context became more intelligent. Creativity became more connected to audience's mindset. And marketers increasingly recognized that understanding people requires more than data points alone.
For us at Seedtag, those conversations continue shaping the future of Neuro-Contextual Advertising.
Because the future of advertising will not belong to the brands that know the most about consumers. It will belong to the brands that understand the moment best.
And increasingly, that future is becoming more human-aware.
Our Blog
Custom AI has become an indispensable tool for agencies seeking a competitive edge in the rapidly evolving digital marketing landscape.
Beyond its initial application in audience targeting, custom AI is revolutionizing various aspects of digital advertising, from lookalike audiences and bidding strategies to measurement and optimization. Its most profound impact, however, lies in introducing campaign objectives into automated decision-making across marketing organizations, indicating a new era in contextual advertising strategy.
While audience targeting has been a foundational application of custom AI in digital advertising, its potential extends far beyond. Forward-thinking advertisers have leveraged custom AI to guide their contextual strategies for years. As the industry moves toward a privacy-first future, this application of custom AI promises the most significant breakthroughs.
Moving beyond lookalike modeling, custom AI is unlocking cookieless audience targeting
Digital advertising has shifted from predefined audience targeting to adopting more sophisticated, custom AI-driven methods. Initially, brands relied on predefined audiences for user targeting, a necessary compromise given the technological limitations of the time. However, this approach often sacrificed accuracy for simplicity.
Lookalike modeling represented a significant leap forward, enabling brands to expand their target audiences by identifying users with characteristics similar to their specific brand audience. This technique became a staple in the toolkits of major platforms like Facebook and Google.
The latest advancement in this evolution is fully customized targeting designed for the privacy-first web.
This approach employs custom AI to build campaign-specific machine-learning models using first-party data and contextual signals. These models analyze URLs, scoring them based on their semantic relevance to a brand’s campaign brief. The result is a refined selection of content that aligns closely with the campaign’s objectives, surpassing the accuracy of standard segments.
Custom contextual AI is driving improved ad recall
A critical aspect of audience targeting with custom AI is the quality of the underlying audience data and the integrity of the matching process. A study by Truthset highlighted the reliability issues in data used for ad targeting and audience measurement. The study found that matches between hashed email addresses and postal addresses across various data providers were accurate only about 51% of the time, casting doubt on the accuracy of such audience data matches.
Several innovations underpin custom AI’s data integrity and advanced targeting capability. For example, network-level analysis (NLA) is crucial, examining the entire universe of URLs to discern content clusters, trends and semantic relationships. Content retrieval techniques scan this network, identifying URLs that align with the advertiser’s brief. A custom AI model, built and trained with this filtered content set, classifies new articles and ensures that only the most relevant ones are selected for the campaign.
The efficacy of custom contextual AI is evident in its results. For instance, Seedtag’s Affinity Index, which measures context relevancy for the intended audience and message, is typically 92% higher than scores derived from predefined taxonomies. Moreover, ads placed using this technology enhance ad/content fit by 9%, leading to significant uplifts in ad recall (22%) and message association (19%) compared to standard IAB categories.
Custom contextual advertising allows advertisers to adapt in a privacy-first environment
With the progressive loss of reach of third-party cookies, first-party data will play a more important role. However, translating this limited data into scalable marketing campaigns poses a significant challenge.
Contextual targeting, focusing on the environment of the ad placement rather than gathering information from potentially unreliable audience data, ensures relevance to the content being consumed at the moment. This approach bypasses the uncertainties of personal data matching, offering a powerful and sustainable alternative to traditional methods.
Custom contextual advertising, therefore, emerges as a key solution in a privacy-first world. It adapts to the evolving digital landscape and outperforms standardized segments, offering a more accurate and reliable method for placing ads in relevant contexts.
As the digital advertising industry grapples with signal loss and heightened privacy standards, custom contextual AI stands as a beacon of innovation, guiding the way to more effective, responsible and sustainable advertising practices.
By Chad Schulte, Senior Vice President of Agency Partnerships and Strategy at Seedtag.
They say, a picture is worth a thousand words; holds mighty true in today’s world where the human attention span hovers around the 8-second mark. Users encounter numerous ads as they surf through the digital world, making it impossible for text-heavy formats to garner many eyeballs.
The human brain processes images 60,000 times faster than text, and 90% of the information transmitted to the brain is visual. From a human perspective, visualization works best as we respond and process it better than any other type of data. The human brain can recognize a familiar object within 100 milliseconds, and a study by MIT estimates that just 13 milliseconds are sufficient to recognize even unfamiliar images.
Marketers have access to myriad formats like full image, in-image, and videos, to garner one of the most valuable resources of the digital age, attention. Engaging visuals and succinct messaging capture consumer attention and leave a lasting impact.
Win big in the attention economy with the right blend of content and context
Nike, Apple, Budweiser, and Coca-Cola are a few brands that have nailed advertising campaigns that struck a chord and left the world talking for years. That’s the power of creativity.
Creativity plays a crucial role in capturing attention in a digital landscape where consumers are bombarded with information and messages. In a crowded marketplace, ads that are unique, imaginative, and distinctive help brands distinguish themselves and attract attention. Images or videos that are visually appealing are more likely to be shared and remembered. So, add to the mix striking visuals and innovative designs, and that’s an ad strategy that can capture attention quickly.
Contextual advertising enhances the effectiveness of capturing attention by tailoring ads to the specific context of a user's current line of interest. It leverages Artificial Intelligence (AI) to analyze the content and context of web pages, and places ads in the most optimal locations without using any third-party cookies. Since the ads align with the content users are currently engaging with, they are more relevant and personalized, thus increasing engagement.
Contextual advertising uses deep learning, computer vision, and natural language processing to aggregate insights that enable brands to target specific audiences by understanding the context in which the content will appear. Context relates to the content a user is currently consuming making ads more broadly applicable and effective than relying on individually identifiable signals.
Contextual AI can also provide contextual creatives that resonate with users and capture their attention. There are various formats that advertisers can choose from, such as in-article, in-image, and in-video. Using contextual signals, Dynamic Placement Optimization (DPO) ascertains the most suitable location to place the ads.
The power of creativity: Metrics in the attention economy
Attention metrics provide more information for quality arbitrage, and help make smarter decisions. Vendors like Lumen and Adelaide are judging the quality of media based on the probability of attention given by any person to a creative placement. While it may not be considered a media currency yet, measuring creative and placement effectiveness based on the attention amassed is a fair assessment to get insights.
Attention time is a crucial metric that advertisers are closely monitoring in today’s attention economy. Attention time refers to the amount of time a user or consumer spends actively engaged with or paying attention to a particular ad. Relevance, creativity, format, placement, etc. all have a significant impact on this metric.
Research shows that in-image ads are 4x more effective while in-video ads are 6.7x more effective in maintaining attention. Common display ads have 1.5 seconds of viewer attention as against in-image ads at 6 seconds. Regular video ads have 0.6 seconds average viewer attention while in-video ads get 4 seconds.
According to Lumen’s research, as the view time for an advertisement increases, more impressions are converted into sales. For example, an ad that was viewed for 3 seconds was converted to a sale on 50% of occasions. For brands and marketers serving ads, every second counts. Contextual ads have greater engagement rates, boost impressions and brand recall, and help build a memorable and consistent brand identity.
Leveraging consumers’ natural inclination to look at imagery and acing ad placement with context has a direct impact on the bottom line and sales numbers. In-image contextual ads get noticed 3.5 seconds faster and drive attention 3.4 seconds longer. They also have a 4x stronger breakthrough and 3.9x higher purchase intent. These numbers further rise for in-video ads.
The future of Attention Economy
Going a step further, leveraging GenAI capabilities can further strengthen contextual targeting strategies. At Seedtag, we utilized the powers of GenAI and launched a capability that gives brands and agencies the capacity to build tailored creatives based on the context of the surrounding page-level content.
With GenAI, advertisers can create more sophisticated creatives that perfectly match the context of the content in an article or web page. Our contextual AI platform’s Deep Learning, Computer Vision, and Natural Language Processing capabilities enable it to understand the desired outcome of a campaign and creates prompts to modify the original creative to optimize for the best possible outcome.
The combination of GenAI and contextual advertising will empower brands to not just create stellar creatives, but ensure that they are relevant to the context in which they’re served. By create campaign creatives that seamlessly integrate with the context in which they are displayed, brands can win the attention battle and drive better results.
Get in touch to know more about our exclusive GenAI capabilities for contextual advertising.
Streaming services are one of the most sought-after subscriptions of the decade. The pandemic was a catalyst that boosted demand, and the number of streaming service subscriptions passed 1 billion worldwide for the first time in 2020. As of March 2023, 78% of all American households subscribe to at least one or more streaming services. With 231 million subscribers, Netflix ranks as the most subscribed video streaming service globally.
The steady rise of popular streaming services like Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, and Disney+ has contributed to the popularity of Connected TV or CTV. Connected TVs have become the choice among the masses because it gives them the flexibility to connect to the internet, and seamlessly switch between traditional television and online streaming. In 2023, a whopping 88% of U.S. households owned at least one internet-connected TV device, while the number of CTV users amounted to more than 110 million among Gen Z and Millennials.
Investing in Connected TV advertising
With a constantly rising viewership, advertisers quickly began exploring CTV advertising, recognized its potential, and have been making significant investments in the past few years. In 2023, CTV advertising spending in the United States was expected to grow by 21.2% to reach 25.09 billion USD. CTV ad spend is expected to grow to 40.9 billion USD by 2027.
A seamless and convenient option to deliver ads where the masses are, CTV ads are similar to YouTube ads. Marketers can serve personalized, skippable ads to target audiences while they are streaming content on their TVs. The appeal of CTVs has grown owing to more widespread and reliable internet connectivity.
Additionally, beyond the ability to pick between traditional TV and streaming, since connected TVs are connected to the internet, they are highly versatile and support additional features. They give users access to OTT streaming, social media browsing, and watching traditional television as scheduled, delivered through streaming TV apps over the internet rather than traditional broadcast networks.
As television devices become more affordable and a variety of content becomes more accessible, the audience is naturally inclined towards having the option to take their pick and have full control over what they watch.
Marketers: Get acquainted with FAST
FAST, or Free Ad-Supported Television, refers to streaming television services that are available to viewers at no cost. So, how do they generate revenue? Simple; advertising. These platforms do not charge users any subscription fee but, similar to subscription-based streaming services, they offer a variety of on-demand content. They rely solely on advertising for monetization to support their operations.
FAST platforms typically offer a range of content, including movies, TV shows, news, and sometimes live TV channels. Advertisers pay for ad slots, and the ads are displayed during and between content streaming. This revenue supports free access to content for viewers. Some examples of Free Ad-supported Streaming TV services include Roku Channel, Tubi, Pluto TV, Crackle, Peacock, and Samsung TV Plus.
Marketers have been investing in advertising on FAST platforms because it allows them to reach a diverse and sizable audience base and a broad demographic range. Another key aspect is that it allows marketers on a tight budget to reach a large audience without spending significant ad dollars. It is a more cost-effective option when compared to expensive traditional TV advertising.
As the “cord-cutting trends” rise and more viewers shift away from traditional cable in favor of streaming services, FAST opens up new opportunities. It allows marketers to stay relevant and reach audiences on platforms where they are increasingly spending their time. Marketers can explore innovative ad formats like interactive ad experiences and sponsored content to engage viewers. Tracking campaign effectiveness is also better on FAST platforms by accessing metrics such as impressions, click-through rates, and engagement that provide valuable insights.
Making the shift to CTV and FAST
Offering a unique opportunity to meet the audience where they choose to spend a significant amount of time watching content of their choice; CTV advertising and FAST platforms present marketers with a great alternative to traditional ad practices that are pricey and stereotyped. Traditional TV ads just display ads but with CTV and FAST, brands can choose what content they want to advertise beside. This gives marketers more flexibility to align messaging and design with user interests and brand values.
- Improved understanding of viewer interests
- Ads that are non-intrusive and relevant to the current content browsed by the audience
- Messaging in line with the brand's ideas and values
- Compliant with all privacy laws as it does not leverage third-party cookies
They also offer more control and transparency, allowing marketers to have a clearer understanding of where their ads are being displayed. Thus, the newer methods help marketers elevate brand safety, brand suitability, and the overall use experience.
Let’s take an example - You are a regular on a travel channel and passionately follow a particular show that covers unique experiences in lesser-known locations. If a brand curates exclusive, personalized travel itineraries and experiences, you fall under its “ideal target consumer” category. The chances of you wanting to know more about what they do, how they do it, and possibly wanting to plan an experience are much higher. So, if you see their ad during or right after your show, you are likely to explore more.
Still in its early days, CTV and FAST are growing rapidly but come with some challenges. While significant improvements have been made, measurement and tracking of campaigns on television still have certain difficulties. Ad blocking and ad fraud also continue to be significant obstacles in CTV targeting. However, partnering with the right experts and staying tuned to updates and enhancements in the space can hugely benefit marketers. The ability to leverage the latest tech and reach a wider audience that was not accessible before unfolds newer possibilities and opportunities that brands and marketers must explore to stay on top of their game.
There are various reasons why the audience is tired of ads today. What tops the list is the age-old practice of violating user privacy and accessing their personal data to target users as they browse the web. Data privacy has been a hot topic for a while as consumers and advocates created a lot of noise around privacy, making for governance laws like GDPR and CCPA that advertisers must comply with.
Going beyond privacy, traditional targeting strategies carry another tag - stereotypes. Fundamentally, cookie-based advertising involves collecting user data like interests, browsing, and behavioral patterns. Users are grouped into categories mostly basing the entire categorization process on assumptions, stereotypes, and third-party cookies. The results are rather apparent today - Users are left irritable as irrelevant and intrusive ads disrupt their browsing experience.
Advertisers pay a hefty price as poor audience categorization results in incorrect targeting, wasted ad dollars, has a negative impact on user experience, and damages the brand image. The world is also actively championing diversity and inclusivity initiatives, and advertising needs to level up to meet audience preferences.
Old is new: Contextual targeting
The phasing out of third-party cookies has paved the way for various “new” advertising strategies that will help navigate the cookieless world. However, a solution that dates back to the very roots of advertising has garnered the trust and interest of both advertisers and the audience - Contextual advertising.
Built on the principle that targeting remains strictly contextual, this advertising strategy truly focuses on protecting consumer privacy and helps advertisers adopt a more inclusive targeting practice. With contextual targeting, advertisers can steer clear of third-party cookies’ discriminatory practices and not limit targeting based on outdated methodologies. Instead of drawing conclusions by relying on factors like age, race, gender, location, or other such characteristics, advertisers can adopt a privacy-first strategy that enables them to display relevant ads to the most suitable audience by aligning with their real-time interests.
Women like the color pink, prefer skinny jeans, invest extensively in makeup products; the assumptions are plenty. Instead of making conjectures, it is unquestionably better if brands could show ads relevant to people based on the content they are actually consuming. Relevancy helps maximize impact.
Powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), and Natural Language Processing (NLP) capabilities, contextual targeting presents an innovative alternative to stereotypical and non-privacy-compliant strategies. The ability to understand nuances and semantically interpret content makes contextual targeting all the more impressive as it allows advertisers to expand their horizons while elevating brand safety and suitability. Not only does contextual targeting eliminate the appearance of ads alongside negative or harmful content, but it also ensures ad placement aligns with the overall brand message and tonality.
Are you equipped to rise beyond stereotypes and dated advertising practices?
Contextual advertising empowers brands to make the most of AI-driven contextual targeting and elevate to inclusive advertising practices. With contextual targeting, half the battle is already won. You already know that the user is somewhat related to your product or service because ad placements are purely based on their current area of interest.
AI does a deep dive and analyzes the written and visual content of a web page, to understand the content and context. This analysis helps advertisers develop an understanding of what customers are browsing, their areas of interest, and how they engage and interact with content. Beyond just analyzing specific URLs that are limited to certain predefined categories, Network Level Analysis (NLA), looks at the entire universe of URLs. NLA develops an understanding of the network as a whole to understand content clusters and topics that audiences are engaging with at that moment. By appearing where a user is showing interest with an offering that aligns within that realm of interest, brands are more likely to not just convert better but win customers for life.
Like the Backstreet Boys sing, “But I want it that way…”; well, you can. Advertisers can cherry-pick who they want to target and users see only those ads that align with what they’re currently looking for. Truly inclusive and unbiased, contextual targeting is interest-based and does not profile a user based on who they are.
It’s a win-win for all parties involved, and an ideal alternative to cookie-based targeting practices.
Explore more about contextual advertising with us.
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The open web or walled gardens; an ongoing debate that has further intensified since Google’s announcement on the phasing out of third-party cookies. Before we get to what works better and what customers prefer, let’s cover the basics.
What is the open web?
Open web refers to the part of the internet ecosystem where information and resources are freely accessible to all users without any restrictions. Websites, apps, or any other online property that is not owned by a major technology company is typically categorized under the open web.
What are the walled gardens?
Walled gardens refer to closed internet ecosystems controlled by large corporations like Meta, Apple, Instagram, and Amazon without involvement from any outside organization. These big technology corporations ensure that all data, information, and technology stay within the organization, and the entity also controls user access to data, content, and services within the ecosystem.
So, what is the debate around?
For a long time, consumer trends showed a clear inclination towards walled gardens, as users spent significantly more time on platforms like Facebook and YouTube. Naturally, marketers began investing a significant part of their ad budgets in these walled gardens. However, there has been a radical shift in consumer behavior in the past few years.
According to a recent survey, 30% of people said they use Facebook less today than a year ago, while just 8% said they use the open web less than before.
What are the reasons behind this paradigm shift in consumer preference from walled gardens to the open web?
- The survey revealed the number one reason cited by consumers as lack of relevance. Across Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Amazon, consumers felt the content displayed on walled gardens was not as relevant as it used to be before.
- Another factor that marketers should pay heed to is the consumers’ state of mind. Consumers said they are more likely to be “zoning out and not paying attention” when browsing walled gardens.
- Transparency is another factor that consumers stated when referring to content like news on walled gardens.
Thus, the open web is increasingly becoming the preferred choice among today’s consumers. According to the survey:
- 48% of consumers spend more than 1 hour browsing the open web, while walled gardens stand at 30%.
- Consumers are 4x more likely to say they will increase their open web usage over the next 12 months than decrease it, compared to both Facebook and Instagram where they said they will decrease usage.
- People are not just spending more time on the open web. The majority are also “curious and in a mood to learn more” making it an ideal place for advertising.
- 74% of people said they trust articles on news sites or apps more than walled gardens, and that they turn to the open web when looking for high-quality content.
The advertising landscape: Open web vs. Walled gardens
Ad budgets have been flowing into walled gardens for years now, but there seems to be a clear misalignment. With the audience revealing where their interests lie, marketers need to reevaluate their strategies. The change in audience preferences could be the reason certain campaigns don’t perform like they used to or content does not receive the same traction as it did in the past.
Marketers and brands must be more watchful of where their ad dollars are being spent, if campaigns are meeting their objectives, and what returns they are giving to brands. Today’s consumers are spending more time on the open web than walled gardens and this shift is only going to continue to widen in the coming days, putting an end to the walled gardens monopoly.
Why are marketers moving beyond walled gardens?
With the demise of third-party cookies expected to occur in 2024, marketers are exploring alternatives to walled gardens to diversify their advertising strategies and reduce reliance on closed, proprietary platforms. Also, as consumers shift their preferences, it is but obvious that marketers must relook strategies and advertise where their consumers are.
Some of the factors that are driving marketers away include:
- Marketers don’t get full visibility into their campaign performance or customer insights because these platforms keep the granular data to themselves. This takes away the opportunity for brands to dive into the details and gather more meaningful insights that can help fine-tune campaigns and improve customer engagement. Restricted access to user data and lack of transparency hinders effective audience targeting and analytics.
- The need to comply with data privacy laws has further tightened the ropes around data collection and usage, increasing the challenges within walled gardens.
- The closed ecosystem limits marketers’ visibility into ad fraud and brand safety concerns.
- Competition for ad inventory and the closed nature of walled gardens make advertising more expensive.
- These closed ecosystems limit opportunities as they restrict access to marketing content within the ecosystem and only target consumers who are active users of the platform.
Consumers are more actively exploring the open web as it provides a wider range of choices, access to varied content, and diverse opinions and viewpoints. It also gives users greater control over their online data privacy.
Striking the right balance
Consumers’ shifting preferences and marketers’ hunt for alternatives have put the spotlight back on contextual targeting. Contextual advertising is becoming one of the most sought-after targeting strategies that empower marketers to create more effective campaigns. It allows marketers to display relevant ads to the desired audience by analyzing the content and context of web pages.
Contextual ads enable brands to provide a better user experience by creating a non-intrusive campaign that does not hamper the browsing experience of consumers. AI and ML models analyze millions of web pages to determine the content that best aligns with a campaign’s messaging and context, thus placing creatives in the most optimal locations without leveraging any third-party cookies. Since the ads are based on the content of the web page being viewed, contextual targeting ensures that the ads are relevant to what users are currently interested in.
Unlike the limitations of walled gardens, contextual advertising guarantees transparency. Marketers can deliver relevant ads without needing extensive user profiling or personal data, addressing privacy concerns and regulatory restrictions. With more control over where the ads appear, contextual advertising also promises the highest levels of brand safety and suitability.
Our joint research project with Havas and Kia revealed a 70% view rate for contextual ads vs. 64% for cookie-based ads, a 43% increase in brand awareness as against cookie-based ads’ 18%, and 29% higher digital ad recall.
Explore our contextual AI solution that is built to power new-age, privacy-first advertising strategies.
Generative Artificial Intelligence or GenAI shines bright as the ‘it thing’ of this decade. GenAI goes beyond traditional Artificial Intelligence (AI) tasks like classification or prediction, and has the ability to create original content like images and text.
The growth of genAI tools has been explosive in the past year and the latest McKinsey Global Survey revealed that organizations are using genAI regularly in at least one business function.
The survey further revealed that nearly 25% of surveyed C-suite executives are personally using genAI tools for work. While more than 25% of respondents from companies using AI said genAI is already on their boards’ agendas. 40% of respondents said their organizations will increase investment in AI overall because of advances in genAI.
In the AI adoption race, organizations exploring genAI capabilities in conjunction with traditional AI are further ahead, have the first mover’s advantage, and are reaping more benefits. The ever-evolving adtech landscape is leaving no stone unturned in making the most out of genAI to level up.
How is the adtech landscape leveraging the latest in AI?
GenAI unlocks a whole new world of opportunities by providing creative assistance that enables marketers and advertisers with data-backed creative assistance to be more efficient and deliver more impactful campaigns.
From text and creatives to ads and marketing, the evolution of AI and the adoption of next-gen AI models like ChatGPT by Open AI, Bard by Google, and Microsoft Bing is creating huge waves of change and opening doors to never-seen-before possibilities.
This marks the beginning of a new era that is transforming the future of work by bringing together the power of human and artificial intelligence.
AI can assist through the entire process from research to content generation and distribution. It can expedite the creative process by suggesting design elements, layouts and color schemes, and help create more suitable ad copies, product descriptions, and marketing content.
What are the benefits of leveraging Generative AI in advertising?
Adopting genAI can help advertisers save time and resources by enabling them to produce content faster and with ease. By enhancing various aspects of advertising campaigns and strategies, genAI can have a significant impact on the adtech landscape.
The capabilities and use cases of genAI in advertising are vast:
- Produce large volumes of high-quality content across formats like text, image, and video, with ease.
- Analyze customer data and create personalized ad campaigns that have higher engagement and conversion rates.
- Help advertisers in the creative process by suggesting ideas that inspire them to explore newer avenues, and curate fresh, innovative campaigns and messaging.
- Easily create multiple ad variations, simplify A/B testing, and boost ad performance and ROI.
- Explore vast datasets, evaluate, and derive takeaways on key aspects like customer behavior, preferences, and market trends.
- The ability to hyper-personalize at scale using the learnings from AI.
The fusion of Contextual Targeting and GenAI: Fueling new-age advertising strategies
AI is no replacement but an assistant for humans to do more, better, and faster. The two big factors that are currently ruling the adtech landscape are Contextual and Generative AI.
What if you could bring the two together? Imagine the magic that can be created by capitalizing on these two revolutional tools?
Here’s how we leverage the two at Seedtag and enable brands to reap maximum benefits:
- Our proprietary AI-powered contextual technology, Liz©, has the ability to analyze and comprehend expansive volumes of written and visual content to derive insights that help determine the best place to place an ad that will resonate with customers.
- Our GenAI capabilities leverages the learnings from Liz© to provide more relevant creative inputs on colors, image elements, and text to further enhance the quality of the ads.
Advertisers and creative agencies are using the best of AI and contextual advertising to curate strategies and generate content that perform better than the conventional ones.
Contextual targeting primarily addresses the big concern of privacy and enables advertisers to make data-driven decisions, and reach their target audience without leveraging any third party cookies.
The intelligence from the analysis then enables generative AI in the creative process and empowering advertisers to work more efficiently and create more engaging and personalized campaigns.
While AI empowers customers with data to drive decision making, genAI uses these data points to understand patterns and create new content like text and images. The new content created by genAI is data-backed and hence more capable of identifying elements like the best keywords, colors, and images to use for a particular campaign. The two complement each other and power more effective ad campaigns by elevating brand messaging and creatives.
Benefits for advertisers
When used together, they allow advertisers to:
- Produce high-quality, contextually relevant content by analyzing the context of a webpage or app and generating ad creatives that match the content and context of the page.
- Generate personalized and contextual ad messaging based on a user’s current search or area of interest.
- Analyze the content and context of web pages or apps to identify relevant keywords and phrases that can be used to better target ads to specific content categories or topics.
- Optimize ad copy to match the context and language style of the content it appears alongside.
- Create narratives that align with the content and context ads appear alongside, and adapt ad content in real-time based on changing contextual factors.
Applying Contextual Targeting practices coupled with GenAI capabilities: The business impact
Developing a strategy that incorporates gen AI into contextual targeting strategies can help brands deliver more relevant and engaging ads to their desired audience. It allows them to align their advertising efforts by ensuring ads seamlessly integrate with the surrounding content and context, making it less intrusive and more engaging.
Using the duo together forges a much stronger strategy that offers myriad benefits:
- Copies and creatives generated by integrating gen AI and contextual targeting are more optimized and relevant. Thus, they garner more attention, increase click-through rates, improve ad performance, and channel a better user experience overall.
- The pair reinforces brand safety and suitability by ensuring that brand elements and messaging remain consistent across ad creatives and text. Content generated is contextually relevant and reflects the brand’s identity while avoiding ad placements on websites or apps with inappropriate or controversial content.
- Contextual targeting with gen AI can boost ROI on advertising spends by optimizing ad creatives, messaging, targeting, and placement.
- The combination can also protect brands from ad fraud by ensuring ads are displayed only on relevant and desired web pages and apps.
On the whole, using contextual targeting and gen AI in tandem enables brands to derive more value, gives them a competitive edge, and helps them future-proof their business. Advertisers can curate more personalized experiences that customers love and engage with, which in turn increases customer satisfaction and brand loyalty.
Early adoption of gen AI in integration with contextual targeting will enable brands to develop strategies that not only give a competitive advantage but help them adopt tech that is integral in the advertising space. It is an opportunity to level up and better position themselves in the ever-changing landscape for continued success.
Explore our contextual AI solution that is built to provide brands a premium advertising approach. To know more, get in touch.
Connected TV (CTV) advertising is a rapidly growing segment within digital advertising, enabling brands to reach specific audiences through internet-connected devices. But what is CTV advertising? It refers to the delivery of video ads on smart TVs, gaming consoles, and other devices connected to the internet. Unlike traditional linear TV advertising, CTV offers precise audience targeting, allowing advertisers to measure the effectiveness of their campaigns with advanced analytics.
Internet-connected devices like Smart TVs have become one of the most sought-after products in the last decade. Access to OTT video streaming has become a must-have, especially among the younger generations.
Statista's 2023 research revealed that 92% of US households were reachable by CTV programmatic advertising, while Gen Z and Millennial CTV users amounted to more than 110 million.
With the rapid change in opting for CTV experiences over linear television and the solid foothold OTT platforms have gained globally, advertisers have quickly noticed the digital migration, putting advertise on CTV targeting in the spotlight. Despite the slowdown triggered by the pandemic, the research reported that CTV ad spending in the United States increased by 33% in 2022. The latest projections suggest that the expenditure will more than double and surpass USD 38 billion by 2026, accounting for more than 5% of US ad spending.
CTV targeting: For the new era of television
With a higher viewership, increased streaming time, and higher revenue numbers; the explosive rise of CTV and OTT services has powered an evident shift in advertising spending. Revenue in the OTT Video segment is projected to reach USD 315.50bn in 2023, with OTT Advertising being the most prominent segment having a market volume of USD 206.90bn in 2023. A report suggests that nearly 50% of marketers would spend more on CTV targeting if they had high-quality first-party data to back their targeting strategy.
Like most other new areas of advertising, CTV targeting has its challenges.
- Since it's a relatively new ad space, there are a lot of knowledge gaps. This makes it harder to get organization buy-ins and budgets for exploration. Additionally, audience fragmentation across platforms and devices makes audience targeting tougher.
- Measurement and tracking of campaigns on television have always been challenging. With CTV involving multiple devices, how can marketers track campaign performance or measure the effectiveness of your campaigns to understand if the ads reach the desired specific audience? The lack of standardized measurement makes it hard to evaluate the effectiveness of campaigns.
- Ad blocking and ad fraud continue to be significant challenges in CTV targeting.
- With access to limited audience information like demographics and geography, audience targeting poses a challenge. Marketers need access to audience data to create effective CTV campaigns that deliver ads to the right audience.
- Limited ad inventory makes quality and scale difficult, as limited spots are available during peak viewing times.
Contextual advertising and CTV targeting
A strategy that is purely driven by the analysis of content and context, contextual advertising can enable marketers to overcome these challenges and enhance advertise on CTV strategies. Unlike behavioral targeting, which requires audience data to aid CTV campaigns, contextual AI focuses on targeting audience segments by placing ads alongside relevant streaming content that aligns with the audience's interests.
For example, contextual advertising can enable sports and fitness equipment or apparel brands to target viewers interested in live sports and sports-related shows. The video ads displayed are relatable and lie within the viewer's realm of interest, increasing visibility and reducing the possibility of showing the ads to viewers who are less likely to be interested in the product.
Additionally, advertisers can leverage gaming consoles as another prime avenue for advertising on CTV. Many modern gaming consoles support streaming services, allowing advertisers to reach a younger, highly engaged audience that frequently consumes video content on demand. This expands the reach of CTV advertising beyond traditional smart TV users and into the growing gaming community.
One of the key advantages of connected TV advertising is its ability to track video completion rate effectively. Since viewers are more likely to watch an entire video ad on CTV than on other digital platforms, advertisers can ensure that their messaging is fully delivered. This metric is crucial for measuring engagement and understanding how effectively an ad influences a viewer's decision to purchase after viewing an ad.
The future of CTV advertising
Advertise on CTV is promising, with advancements in AI and machine learning enabling even better ad placements and audience segmentation. As more brands invest in OTT advertising and fine-tune their CTV campaigns, the industry will see improved ROI and deeper insights into viewer behavior. Marketers who adapt early and integrate CTV advertising into their digital strategies will gain a competitive edge in reaching highly engaged audiences.
Contextual advertising-backed CTV targeting is more effective than demographic or geography-based targeting. It allows brands to render ads to viewers who are more likely to have a genuine interest in their products or services and not just show ads based on age or location.
With this, marketers also elevate brand safety, brand suitability, and user experience -
- Improved understanding of viewer interests
- Ads that are non-intrusive and relevant to the content being viewed by the audience
- Messaging in line with the brand's ideas and values
- Compliant with all privacy laws as it does not leverage third-party cookies
CTV advertising is building future-ready strategies and brands are already leveraging it to steer ahead. Have you explored CTV targeting yet?
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Phasing out of third-party cookies, brand safety and brand suitability, privacy laws, and changing customer preferences are among the top factors that have brought the spotlight back on contextual advertising in the global ad tech landscape. Contextual ads are increasingly becoming the preferred choice among advertisers, publishers, and customers today.
A factor that plays a key role in helping brands reach their desired target audience is the audience selection process. An audience refers to a group of people with similar interests and shared characteristics. This crucial element helps brands reach the right individuals who are most likely to be interested in their product or service.
Traditionally, audience categorization is a process where people are grouped based on their interests and past behavior patterns. This method is limiting because it tends to group individuals based on stereotypes, and relies on third-party cookies. Poor categorization of personas can have a negative impact on marketing efforts and campaigns as the categories are not 100% accurate, resulting in incorrect targeting and wasted ad dollars.
We live in a world that is embracing diversity and inclusivity with open arms and actively steering away from stereotypes. Brands looking to level up their advertising game need to keep up with the changing times and better understand audience preferences.
What if they could go a step further with their targeting strategies?
What are Contextual Audiences?
Contextual advertising focuses on placing ads on web pages where the on-page content and context align with the ads. Contextual audiences refer to individuals who are identified and grouped based on their online behavior and the context of the content they are currently engaging with.
At first glance, contextual audiences may seem very similar to the traditional audience categorization process where people are grouped based on their interests. However, the key differentiator is that contextual audiences do not leverage any personal data, and create audience groups solely based on contextual cues.
Instead of using the most common and typical way of grouping individuals based on personal information, contextual audiences use the power of context to group people. Contextual audiences ensure scalability, privacy adherence, and greater precision, making it a method ideal for the post-cookie world.
What challenges do Contextual Audiences solve for customers?
Contextual audiences are a targeting capability that enables brands to ace audience segmentation and targeting by displaying ads that are most relevant to them.
- With the deprecation of third-party cookies and the implementation of tighter data privacy laws, brands need a solution that empowers them to reach the desired target audience.
- Consumers have raised concerns about data privacy and do not want to be tracked or are already untrackable. In a world that puts data privacy on the front seat, this targeting capability is a great way to deliver relevant ads without violating privacy.
- It is also a great way to reach out to the most relevant customers with ads that better align with their real-time interests, using the right message, and displaying them at the right time.
Go a step further with Seedtag Contextual Audiences
The conventional way brands understand their audience does not work anymore as they are built on stereotypes, clichés, and non-privacy-compliant strategies. Contextual audiences can help brands find a diverse, inclusive, and relevant audience base using privacy-first technology.
Seedtag Contextual Audiences can help customers do all of that and more! Crafted using Custom AI, contextual categories, images, and cookieless sociodemographic models, our contextual audiences evolve from customer input and diverse market research.
Powered by Liz, our pioneering AI technology, Seedtag Contextual Audiences are built to deliver audiences that are unique and dynamic to suit specific business needs. Using AI models, our contextual audiences create a comprehensive network that generates audience categorizations that are relevant to a brand, whilst respecting consumer privacy.
Types of Contextual Audiences
To empower brands with our unique, AI-powered targeting capabilities, Seedtag offers three types of audiences:
- Signature Audiences: These are audiences defined by Seedtag and backed by insights provided by Liz, panelists, and research data. Brands can seamlessly activate pre-defined and tested audiences with clear interests and attitudes toward their products. Signature Audiences provide very accurate results with room for a certain degree of customization to better suit brand needs.
Examples: Luxury Car Enthusiasts, Adventure and Outdoor Enthusiasts, and Environmentally Conscious Consumers.
- Off-the-shelf Seasonal Audiences: Similar to contextual audiences but more focused on a particular event in time, this type has a clear start and end date for activations, and takes advantage of interest spikes throughout the year.
Examples: Black Friday sale, Earth Day awareness, and F1 Grand Prix season. - Custom Audiences: These are one-of-a-kind audiences engineered to help brands solve specific challenges. As the name suggests, this goes beyond the pre-set audiences, leverages the targeting capabilities of Liz, finds exactly where the users are, and creates a tailor-made audience targeting strategy.
What sets Seedtag´s Contextual Audiences apart from regular audiences?
Traditional audience targeting methods typically leverage cookies, and the audience categorization is based on stereotypes. This contributed to the increase in the popularity of contextual targeting methods which are interest-based. It targets the most relevant users at the right time with content that aligns with their current mindset.
However, even contextual targeting cannot solve every challenge and it has its limitations when it comes to scale. Seedtag contextual audiences go beyond these limitations and provide a targeting capability that is cookie-free, flexible, accurate, and precise.
Seedtag's contextual audiences are future-proof, thoroughly tested, built for scale, and backed by advanced AI models. The audiences are constantly updated using our network analysis capabilities to optimize targeting precision and meet KPIs. With Custom AI, our targeting capability offers unique audience definitions and real-time improvements.
We partnered with Metrix Lab to evaluate the effectiveness of our custom AI in delivering precision at scale to unique target audiences. The research revealed that using custom AI, which is the backbone of our contextual audiences, affinity went up by 92%.
- Seedtag’s Custom AI model allows brands to craft unique contextual territories based on the audiences’ interests.
- Our technology goes well beyond classic contextual technologies. We leverage external and internal innovation in the AI ecosystem to bring new capabilities like contextual audiences that go beyond standard taxonomies. For example, curating a campaign targeting automotive enthusiasts or city drivers and urban commuters.
- Brands can create unique, tailored audiences without any dependencies on cookies.
- Our targeting capability is constantly evolving and improving as it is based on real-time data from our network.
- It enables brands to engage with users at the most optimal time by effectively delivering personalized and optimized experiences.
Contextual audiences by Seedtag are advanced and garner users by capturing their attention at the ideal moment, without relying on cookies. It also addresses the reach and scalability issues that many brands currently face and is a flexible solution that goes beyond rigid taxonomies or stereotypes. The unique targeting capability fueled by AI offers greater precision and helps achieve higher accuracy when compared to traditional targeting practices.
Get in touch with us to know more about our latest targeting capabilities powered by AI models.
Phasing out of third-party cookies, brand safety and brand suitability, privacy laws, and changing customer preferences are among the top factors that have brought the spotlight back on contextual advertising in the global ad tech landscape. Contextual ads are increasingly becoming the preferred choice among advertisers, publishers, and customers today.
A factor that plays a key role in helping brands reach their desired target audience is the audience selection process. An audience refers to a group of people with similar interests and shared characteristics. This crucial element helps brands reach the right individuals who are most likely to be interested in their product or service.
Traditionally, audience categorization is a process where people are grouped based on their interests and past behavior patterns. This method is limiting because it tends to group individuals based on stereotypes, and relies on third-party cookies. Poor categorization of personas can have a negative impact on marketing efforts and campaigns as the categories are not 100% accurate, resulting in incorrect targeting and wasted ad dollars.
We live in a world that is embracing diversity and inclusivity with open arms and actively steering away from stereotypes. Brands looking to level up their advertising game need to keep up with the changing times and better understand audience preferences.
What if they could go a step further with their targeting strategies?
What are Contextual Audiences?
Contextual advertising focuses on placing ads on web pages where the on-page content and context align with the ads. Contextual audiences refer to individuals who are identified and grouped based on their online behavior and the context of the content they are currently engaging with.
At first glance, contextual audiences may seem very similar to the traditional audience categorization process where people are grouped based on their interests. However, the key differentiator is that contextual audiences do not leverage any personal data, and create audience groups solely based on contextual cues.
Instead of using the most common and typical way of grouping individuals based on personal information, contextual audiences use the power of context to group people. Contextual audiences ensure scalability, privacy adherence, and greater precision, making it a method ideal for the post-cookie world.
What challenges do Contextual Audiences solve for customers?
Contextual audiences are a targeting capability that enables brands to ace audience segmentation and targeting by displaying ads that are most relevant to them.
- With the deprecation of third-party cookies and the implementation of tighter data privacy laws, brands need a solution that empowers them to reach the desired target audience.
- Consumers have raised concerns about data privacy and do not want to be tracked or are already untrackable. In a world that puts data privacy on the front seat, this targeting capability is a great way to deliver relevant ads without violating privacy.
- It is also a great way to reach out to the most relevant customers with ads that better align with their real-time interests, using the right message, and displaying them at the right time.
Go a step further with Seedtag Contextual Audiences
The conventional way brands understand their audience does not work anymore as they are built on stereotypes, clichés, and non-privacy-compliant strategies. Contextual audiences can help brands find a diverse, inclusive, and relevant audience base using privacy-first technology.
Seedtag Contextual Audiences can help customers do all of that and more! Crafted using Custom AI, contextual categories, images, and cookieless sociodemographic models, our contextual audiences evolve from customer input and diverse market research.
Powered by Liz, our pioneering AI technology, Seedtag Contextual Audiences are built to deliver audiences that are unique and dynamic to suit specific business needs. Using AI models, our contextual audiences create a comprehensive network that generates audience categorizations that are relevant to a brand, whilst respecting consumer privacy.
Types of Contextual Audiences
To empower brands with our unique, AI-powered targeting capabilities, Seedtag offers three types of audiences:
- Signature Audiences: These are audiences defined by Seedtag and backed by insights provided by Liz, panelists, and research data. Brands can seamlessly activate pre-defined and tested audiences with clear interests and attitudes toward their products. Signature Audiences provide very accurate results with room for a certain degree of customization to better suit brand needs.
Examples: Luxury Car Enthusiasts, Adventure and Outdoor Enthusiasts, and Environmentally Conscious Consumers.
- Off-the-shelf Seasonal Audiences: Similar to contextual audiences but more focused on a particular event in time, this type has a clear start and end date for activations, and takes advantage of interest spikes throughout the year.
Examples: Black Friday sale, Earth Day awareness, and F1 Grand Prix season. - Custom Audiences: These are one-of-a-kind audiences engineered to help brands solve specific challenges. As the name suggests, this goes beyond the pre-set audiences, leverages the targeting capabilities of Liz, finds exactly where the users are, and creates a tailor-made audience targeting strategy.
What sets Seedtag´s Contextual Audiences apart from regular audiences?
Traditional audience targeting methods typically leverage cookies, and the audience categorization is based on stereotypes. This contributed to the increase in the popularity of contextual targeting methods which are interest-based. It targets the most relevant users at the right time with content that aligns with their current mindset.
However, even contextual targeting cannot solve every challenge and it has its limitations when it comes to scale. Seedtag contextual audiences go beyond these limitations and provide a targeting capability that is cookie-free, flexible, accurate, and precise.
Seedtag's contextual audiences are future-proof, thoroughly tested, built for scale, and backed by advanced AI models. The audiences are constantly updated using our network analysis capabilities to optimize targeting precision and meet KPIs. With Custom AI, our targeting capability offers unique audience definitions and real-time improvements.
We partnered with Metrix Lab to evaluate the effectiveness of our custom AI in delivering precision at scale to unique target audiences. The research revealed that using custom AI, which is the backbone of our contextual audiences, affinity went up by 92%.
- Seedtag’s Custom AI model allows brands to craft unique contextual territories based on the audiences’ interests.
- Our technology goes well beyond classic contextual technologies. We leverage external and internal innovation in the AI ecosystem to bring new capabilities like contextual audiences that go beyond standard taxonomies. For example, curating a campaign targeting automotive enthusiasts or city drivers and urban commuters.
- Brands can create unique, tailored audiences without any dependencies on cookies.
- Our targeting capability is constantly evolving and improving as it is based on real-time data from our network.
- It enables brands to engage with users at the most optimal time by effectively delivering personalized and optimized experiences.
Contextual audiences by Seedtag are advanced and garner users by capturing their attention at the ideal moment, without relying on cookies. It also addresses the reach and scalability issues that many brands currently face and is a flexible solution that goes beyond rigid taxonomies or stereotypes. The unique targeting capability fueled by AI offers greater precision and helps achieve higher accuracy when compared to traditional targeting practices.
Get in touch with us to know more about our latest targeting capabilities powered by AI models.
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Connected TV (CTV) gained popularity in the mid-2010s as internet-enabled smart TVs and streaming devices became commonplace. With the growth of platforms like Hulu, Roku, Disney and more, the spending on ads for CTV has also been rising quite steadily. According to e-marketer, CTV is one of the fastest-growing channels in digital advertising and is projected to reach $29.5 billion in 2024. Companies are seeing significant benefits from this channel, with Hulu making over $3 billion and YouTube making over $2.5 billion in ad revenues from CTV.
CTV has become an increasingly important part of the TV landscape, as viewers have increasingly turned to internet-connected devices to consume content. Like all things relatively new, this growth in the popularity of CTV as a medium for advertising has come with its own share of misconceptions and assumptions. Even the term CTV is ambiguous to many given the number of devices one can stream content on these days. Some of the common misconceptions about CTV advertising are as follows –
- CTV is only for younger audiences
While CTV has traditionally been associated with younger audiences, we saw a change in the demographics over the last couple of years. During the pandemic, there was a notable increase in not just the viewership of Gen-Z and millennial audiences, but also an increase in the number of baby boomers. CTV viewership is becoming increasingly mainstream, with a growing number of households disconnecting traditional cable TV in favor of streaming services. As a result, CTV offers a valuable opportunity for advertisers to reach a wide range of demographics, from youngsters to families to seniors, who are using CTV devices to consume content. Advertisers find the extensive demographic coverage of CTV valuable because CTV viewers are deeply invested in the content they choose to watch and are less likely to skip ads.
- There’s no difference between CTV advertising and Linear TV advertising
Numerous traditional businesses still feel that there’s a large overlap between CTV and Linear TV advertising. The reality is that the biggest difference between advertising on CTV and linear TV is the audience. Linear TV advertising tends to have a broad reach while CTV advertising can be more targeted, allowing advertisers to reach specific audiences based on demographics, interests, and behavior. Advertising on CTV allows better personalization and ensures TV viewers are more engaged and receptive to ads that are relevant to their interests. Today’s CTV advertising even allows audiences to interact with the ad, changing the very nature of advertising. Brands like Chevrolet, Pepsi, IKEA are already rolling out interactive ads.
- CTV and OTT are not the same, though they are related
Marketers continue to use the terms CTV and OTT (Over-The-Top) interchangeably. While the two are related, they are not the same. OTT is a category that includes apps and services for streaming video content, independent of traditional cable or pay-TV subscriptions. Connected TV (CTV), on the other hand, refers to the device used by the viewer to access OTT content. In other words, CTV is a subset of OTT and is the platform on which viewers watch streaming video content without requiring traditional subscriptions.
- CTV ads cannot be skipped
If we look at a platform like YouTube, for those of us not looking to pay for ad-free subscription, YouTube offers a variety of options to skip or not skip ads. Some ads can be skipped after a certain amount of time has passed, while some ads need to be viewed entirely before you can access the content. Quite similarly, CTV ads can be skipped depending on the ad format and platform used. Some CTV platforms may offer non-skippable ads that require viewers to watch them in full before returning to their content. Meanwhile, other platforms may offer skippable ads that can be skipped after a set amount of time has passed. As discussed above, some CTV ad formats may also include interactive elements that allow viewers to engage with the ad and receive a more personalized experience. It is up to the advertiser to define how to engage with the consumer using the platform on CTV.
- CTV provides only high-quality inventory
Various types of CTV inventory are available, ranging from remnants to high-quality opportunities.Advertisers can access premium inventory opportunities to showcase their ads during popular TV shows and movies, and reach engaged audiences during prime hours. The quality of CTV inventory can vary significantly depending on multiple factors such as content providers, geographic locations, ad placements, and type of content.
- Measuring ROI from CTV advertising is difficult, hence not worth it
While it is true that measuring the effectiveness of CTV advertising can be more complex than traditional linear TV, advertising on CTV is measured with very similar digital advertising metrics like impressions delivered, click-through rate, cost per acquisition, performance by creative, geo and much more. CTV advertising also covers all the relevant metrics around brand safety to ensure audiences stay engaged. Using AI technology in programmatic CTV ad campaigns is expected to enhance their efficiency and effectiveness. Marketing firms will be able to offer clients performance-based pricing models using AI, thereby increasing the attractiveness of CTV advertising.
CTV presents brands with a tremendous opportunity to address the growing number of users switching from traditional cable TV or liner TV to a more digital-friendly option. CTV advertising is quickly emerging as another powerful channel to successfully target and meaningfully engage with audiences. The ability to provide higher ROI, experiences to consumers and enhanced targeting makes CTV advertising a compelling investment for those seeking to diversify their advertising strategies and stay competitive in the dynamic advertising landscape. Write to us at Seedtag to understand how we’re helping leading brands across the globe foray into advertising on CTV and explore how we can help your business make the jump.
In 2017, technology giant Google came under extreme fire from large brands like Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble, Microsoft and others for placing ads on YouTube videos promoting racist and anti-Semitic content . This resulted in other brands like Starbucks, PepsiCo and General Motors immediately pulling their ads from YouTube. Google also saw brands ramp down the spending on all Google advertising except targeted ads.
According to a 2020 study, 75% of global executives have experienced a recent reputational crisis that could have been prevented. Before online advertising became integral to brands, advertising campaigns were crafted based on viewability and subsequently ROI. The more places you saw the ad, the higher the recall with a direct impact on sales. As online avenues grew, brands too leveraged technology to maximize their reach.
When it came to digital advertising, it was no longer just about how many times the target audiences saw the ad, but also where the ad was presented, adjacent content, context where the consumer saw the ad and more. This shift gave rise to two frequently used terms – ‘Brand Safety’ and ‘Brand Suitability’.
‘Brand safety’ was the first major focus area for brands in the online world. ‘Brand safety’ is defined as the steps a brand takes to keep its reputation safe when advertising online. This ensures that
all the brand elements deliver a positive message, do not appear in unsafe environments or seem confrontational with other brands in the market. The lack of focus on this foundational element will result in financial losses and reputational backlash. In 2017, brand safety cost YouTube 5% of their top North American advertisers.
While ‘brand safety’ covered the basic premise of ensuring that an ad does not show up at inappropriate places or videos, it largely relies on primitive techniques like keyword-ban lists and URL block listing. The techniques used did miss out on one big component – ‘context’. This does not cover sites with fake news, extremist content, fraud sites and even relevant sites purely based on keywords. This is where ‘brand suitability’ comes in.
Brand suitability determines if the context in which an ad or piece of content appears is an appropriate fit for the brand that is advertising. Brand suitability is the logical next step in the evolution of brand safety that ensures displaying advertising in the right environment to the right audience based not on keywords, but on context. For example, an ad for a new car would not be suitable for a news article about a car crash. Very recently, CNN was criticized for an ill-timed ad placement of Applebee’s along with the announcement of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This is where brand suitability leads the way.
As consumers become more aware of online privacy, and governments stepping in with acts like the GDPR and the California Consumer Privacy Act to protect consumer’s private data rights, we’re seeing a shift towards privacy-first advertising. Personal data-driven tools, like third-party cookies, while effective, are viewed as invasive and are being phased out of use. Brands are leveraging technologies like AI to discover new ways to place ads in a way that meet the expectations of consumers while ticking off the checklist for brand safety and brand suitability.
As we move ahead, ‘context’ along with high quality creatives will be the foundation of every ad strategy. Contextual advertising has proven to be the way forward for brands looking to maximize returns while ensuring the brand is perceived positively. The targeting mechanisms have proven to be more advanced allowing brands to focus on creating compelling marketing content. We at Seedtag have been helping brands craft effective advertising campaigns that maximize ROI while ensuring positive brand recall and association.
As the amount of time consumers spent online exponentially grew over the last few years, brands began investing more and more in online advertising. Brands resorted to using all the means available to fight for the diminishing attention spans of their target audiences. However, consumers became increasingly aware of how they were being targeted and the perceptions of online advertising significantly worsened. It no longer became acceptable to collect personal data for advertising purposes without the explicit consent of the consumer. Tools like third-party cookies which were initially designed to enhance the consumer experience soon became the enemy. Tech giants like Apple and Google soon decided to do away with cookies altogether.
With challenges around data privacy and how brands were using personal information becoming one of the biggest concerns, governments stepped in with legislation such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) to define how a business needed to be transparent about the way data was collected, stored and used. This resulted in all of us being subject to the cookie-consent pop up whenever we’ve visited a website. While most pop-ups try to define what data is being tracked and how it is being used, it’s done little to help consumer perception.
Most consumers continue to be bombarded with ads for a product or service they looked up online well after they’ve either lost interest or have already purchased. Despite the wealth of information in a cookie, consumers today continue to feel they aren’t getting value in return for the information they are giving up.
We at Seedtag collaborated with the international internet-based data analysis and market research firm YouGov to survey 3.000 adults across 6 European countries to understand how consumers perceive online advertising, their preferences for funding editorial content and the value they feel they get from the ads they encounter online. According to the survey, 84% of respondents feel the ads they are served online lack personal relevance. This is further backed up by nearly a third of all respondents stating that they deny all cookies on the sites they visit while 12% stating that they provide false information while filling out cookie forms. Clearly, there’s no love lost when it comes to consumers of today and online cookies. The survey generated three key insights:
- Data Privacy benefits both consumers and brands – Data privacy is a key concern for consumers. 82% of participants felt positive or very positive about brands ending their use of personal data for targeting. Brands that want to continue to be trusted need to have a robust data privacy policy in place and be transparent with their consumers. Companies that move away from leveraging third-party data or are more mindful about what consumer data they are collecting and why, will continue to be perceived positively in the online world.
- Consumers don’t mind being served advertising in exchange for free content – It’s not all bad news for advertisers. There is still a large section of users who are on-board with being served ads, provided they get value in terms of free editorial content tailored to their interests. 58% of participants chose hybrid or ad supported methods for funding the journalistic content they consume. Advertisers need to go back to the drawing board to evaluate how they can add more value to consumers seeing their ads.
- Relevant ads attract attention when placed in the right context – Context and creativity continue to lead the way in the online advertising world. 53% of users responded that ads embedded within high quality content were more likely to grab their attention. Consumers who spend a large part of their day on digital media place a high value on the context in which they see the ad. The survey indicates that “dedicated” readers, ie. those participants who spend time reading digital media multiple times a day, are 177% more likely to feel positive about a brand if the ad is shown to them alongside content that is relevant to them. This is where ‘context’ would play a large role in a post-cookie world for brands.
The market is at a very interesting inflection point when it comes to online advertising. Consumer expectations when it comes to data privacy swing between those who are completely against any use of personal data and those who are willing to share it as long as they get something of fair value in exchange. Advertisers and brands need to juggle with meeting these expectations and changes in the way they’ve been doing business. However, the challenges setby current data privacy acts are creating new opportunities for brands to innovate by leveraging new technologies. Early results do indicate that brands are able to target audiences better and see significantly higher returns on their investment, allowing them to focus on creativity rather than just inventory.
Brands that can successfully craft a privacy-first approach and are able to leverage new-age tools like Contextual AI, will be able to strike the perfect balance between personalization and privacy, and eventually thrive. To further understand the various perceptions consumers have towards online advertising, and subsequently build a strategy to effectively engage with them, download our research report today.
Topics API is the new Privacy Sandbox entrant that is replacing Google’s previous Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) proposal. There has been a huge buzz around Google’s decision to phase out third-party cookies and the Privacy Sandbox initiative was a step in that direction.
Globally, the focus today lies on data privacy. Consumers have made it abundantly clear that third-party cookies are violating their data privacy and thus began the motion to phase them out. FLoC was a part of the larger Privacy Sandbox initiative, a privacy-first web tracking technology. Google faced a lot of backlash ever since the announcement, and after collating feedback from the trials decided to drop the FLoC and replace it with a new initiative, Topics API.
The FLoC model revolved around the concept of grouping people into cohorts based on their browsing patterns. This idea did not fly well among privacy advocates as they believed the algorithm could be reverse-engineered, giving rise to new privacy concerns. Replacing FLoC is Topics API, the new initiative for privacy-first, interest-based advertising, created keeping in mind the learnings and community feedback on the earlier proposal.
What is the Topics API Privacy Sandbox proposal?
Topics API aims to provide a highly secure browsing experience for users:
- The API labels every website within one of the high-level topics
- It enables the browsers to determine your top interests for the week based on your browsing history.
- Shared as one new topic per week, the topics are stored only for three weeks and all old topics are deleted.
- There are no external servers (not even Google servers) involved as all the topics are selected on the user’s device.
- Only 3 topics, one from each of the past three weeks are picked and shared with websites and its advertising partners.
- The main list of Topics is a human-curated list that is visible to the public and capped at 350 topics to prevent any risk of fingerprinting.
That’s not all. Topics also excludes sensitive categories like gender or race, and extends more control to users as it is powered by their browser. Google aims to further facilitate transparency and data control by also giving users access to disable this feature entirely, or remove any topic they choose to.
Let’s take an example to better understand Topics API – Say you search for something related to automobiles, the API will label the website under the topic ‘Automobiles & Vehicles’. Similarly, based on your browsing history, your browser will collect your most recent topics of interest and share it with advertisers to show you ads that are relevant, without knowing any specifics about your browsing history. For more details about the API and how it works, click here.
With this, users have more visibility and control over their data unlike third-party cookies, while also enabling advertisers to serve relevant ads without involving any technique that invades user privacy.
How will Topics API impact the advertising industry?
This initiative will give advertisers access to topics users have been interested in recently, keeping the possibility of interest levels high as the topics are fresh and updated on a tri-weekly basis. However, this has been the latest worry factor for advertisers and marketers as it could dilute their targeting capabilities.
With cookies phasing out and Topics API still in its testing phase, without any clarity about its effectiveness or regulatory compliance, it is about time advertisers expand their horizons and explore other avenues they can leverage for successful interest-based advertising strategies.
A strategy that has been gaining popularity among global brands today is contextual advertising. An ideal solution for the cookieless era, contextual advertising analyzes both content and context of a website to determine if it will be the right fit. Contextual ads are compliant with all data protection standards and do not leverage any personal information of users. With contextual targeting, ads are non-intrusive and rendered only within the user’s area of interest.
Contextual advertising rates high on brand safety and suitability as the strategy incorporates the GARM framework. It traverses a vast ocean of content and picks only those websites and categories that are relevant to a brand’s products and services, while ensuring all sensitive and harmful content is avoided and also creating an apt balance between risk and opportunity. Additionally, with Seedtag’s contextual AI technology, advertisers are also able to leverage the power of machine learning to get a human-like understanding of content to deliver ads that not only capture audience attention but also retain it longer.
For instance, the global technology giant, LG, leveraged contextual advertising to spread its campaign dynamically and creatively. They saw a +53% rise in CTR and +24% increase in viewability. Levis, one of America’s most loved clothing brands, opted for contextual ads to raise brand awareness and increase its association with sustainability. The results? 79.4%viewabilityand 66.5% VTR.
Get in touch with us and learn more about how our Contextual AI is helping global brands lead the way in the cookieless world.
Pursuit of excellence is what keeps great men moving and the pursuit of perfection is what keeps great brands exploring!
Seedtag’s contextual creativity has been focused on creating efficient and pro-privacy advertising solutions for brands in the cookieless era. In a strategic move towards strengthening its product portfolio, Seedtag, the leading contextual advertiser in EMEA and LATAM, recently acquired KMTX (previously Keymantics), a French company dedicated to building AI models to optimise and automate performance campaigns. This addition will further empower Seedtag to provide a full-funnel cookieless solution to advertisers that helps them achieve exceptional results in their ad campaigns.
KMTX, is a key French company centered on building the most transparent and data-driven approach to programmatic advertising that helps marketers improve their ad spend efficiency with a special attention on keyword and semantic audiences. With the focus on delivering mid and low funnel KPIs to advertisers, since 2019 they have consistently helped over 150 clients improve more than 500 campaigns and grown to become one of the most reliable digital media partners.
At Seedtag, as we help organizations prosper in the upcoming cookieless era, this acquisition is a logical expansion towards understanding audience insights more accurately and refining targeting strategies better to identify relevant contexts and place ads where they will matter the most.
Jorge Poyatos and Albert Nieto, Co-CEOs and Co-Founders of Seedtag, state: “Over the last few years, we have seen a strong correlation between contextual signals and performance results although we have not had the technology to predict post-click behaviours at scale. The acquisition of KMTX brings AI based predictive models into our stack that combined with our proprietary contextual data will constitute a leading solution for achieving performance results in a cookieless world”.
Arthur Querou, CEO and Co-Founder of KMTX, adds: “Over the past 5 years, we have built a successful business based on helping advertisers make better media buying decisions. With Seedtag we share a common vision of making advertising on the open web simpler through data-driven media investment. By combining KMTX’s technology with Seedtag’s, the industry will be able to avail of a full-funnel contextual AI solution that will help advertisers make accurate targeting decisions in a privacy-first world.”
Gone are the days when advertisers used to piggy-ride on cookies to track consumers anywhere and everywhere on the net. With concerns around data privacy growing by the day, governments and regulating agencies all over the world have strengthened the data privacy laws and brands are now obligated to tweak their strategies to incorporate pro-privacy measures and come up with ways to add to the user experience online and not interrupt it.
With data privacy on the rise and consumers’ attention span in the fall, it makes more sense for brands to invest in measures that are in sync with consumer’s evolving preferences. Such approaches not only garner better views and engagement but also amplify the trust in a brand. The more conscious your consumers become, the more enriching digital experience would they demand. Do your ad campaigns incorporate this gradual shift towards relevance and interest or are they still going the cookies way? Talk to us today and improve to thrive better than your competition.
With the eventual phasing out of third-party cookies and the implementation of various regulatory compliances like CCPA and GDPR, audience targeting is getting tougher than ever in today’s privacy-first world. As the competition skyrockets in the advertising world, leading advertisers are leveraging what is believed to be the future of audience targeting – Contextual Intelligence.
From an estimated global market valuation of US$157.4 billion in the year 2020, today the contextual advertising market is growing at a CAGR of 13.3% and is projected to reach a whopping US$335.1 billion by 2026.
So, what is contextual intelligence? It has been a topic of interest for a long time in the advertising space and is closely associated with contextual advertising today, as this form of advertising has been developed on the same principles. Contextual intelligence involves a deep and thorough analysis of a webpage to determine if it will make a good fit based on various factors like its content, context, relevance, brand safety, and brand suitability. This analysis helps brands enhance their understanding of consumer interests, enables automation, and provides proof points that fuel confident, data-driven decision making.
Contextual advertising, as the name suggests, gives advertisers the power to leverage one of the biggest impact factors – context. With its Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities, contextual advertising delivers ads on relevant websites that target suitable audiences, without the use of cookies.
With context, advertisers and brands can better understand what customers are browsing, their areas of interest, and how they engage and interact with content. By analyzing both the written and visual content of a page, contextual AI offers advertisers the perfect environment where the values and ideas fit seamlessly with their own, thus ensuring the highest levels of brand safety.
Contextual intelligence does not analyze just the text but takes into account all visual elements as well to establish relevance between the text, visuals, and the webpage as a whole. With a complete understanding of customer interests, it is also highly capable of providing contextual creatives that resonate with consumers.
A superior understanding of user behavior coupled with purchase intent and consumer interests helps in serving ads to the right audience by rendering them in optimal places, besides relevant content. Contextual creatives have higher engagement rates and have proven to deliver better impressions, empowering brands to build a memorable and consistent brand identity.
Here’s what a study conducted on contextual targeting revealed:
- 63% higher purchase intent
- 83% higher recommendation of the product advertised
- 40% higher brand favorability
- 73% of consumers said contextual ads rendered alongside video content complemented their overall video experience
Better brand perception, improved sentiment analysis, a stronger connection between the ad and content, and a higher brand valuation on the whole – contextual targeting is paving the way for the future of advertising strategies that put customers and their data privacy first.
What are the top 5 factors that make contextual intelligence the best bet for audience targeting in the era of data privacy?
- Greater ROI: Contextual intelligence-based targeting goes far beyond just keyword research and analyses the content and context of a page to draw customer insights that are leveraged for customer targeting. This has proven to be a more effective targeting strategy as the ads are non-intrusive, more relevant, and resonate better with the audiences, thereby increasing ROI on ad spending. Businesses are constantly on the lookout for cost-effective solutions that fit the modern advertising landscape. Contextual AI makes a great fit as it is an effective, affordable, and scalable solution unlike alternatives such as behavioral advertising. Behavioral ad strategies are heavily reliant on data and need large volumes of data to deliver successful campaigns. Collation, analysis, and reporting of data, and then leveraging it is far more expensive and time-consuming.
- Superior accuracy and personalization capabilities: Since the ad strategies are created based on data-driven insights, advertisers have access to all the information they need to narrow down their lists and target the right people who are looking for that particular product or service. Leveraging new-age tech like AI/ML, contextual intelligence ensures highly accurate targeting by performing a human-like analysis of the content. Contextual AI’s ability to build personalized segments at scale helps advertisers reach their desired target audience by building contextual segments beyond the standard IAB taxonomy. With this, advertisers can deliver ads at a highly granular level, eliminating impression wastage. Brands can create ads that speak more directly and personally with their online consumers. Since the ads are contextual and relevant, consumers are more likely to pay attention and engage better.
- Ensuring brand safety: The human-like analysis of content and context executed using AI/ML capabilities helps identify and avoid any harmful content. Contextual intelligence integrates the GARM framework, implementing universal brand safety standards. This helps avoid sensitive content that could potentially harm brands like sexual content, hate speech, spam, and terrorism.
- Assuring brand suitability: Brand suitability is built atop the brand safety standards. While safety is universal, brand suitability needs are unique to each brand. Contextual intelligence helps focus on brand suitability along with the GARM framework. This intelligent targeting technique picks only those categories that are relevant to and resonate with the brand’s products, services, and unique positioning. The combination of safety and suitability helps brands strike the perfect balance between reach and security, by focusing on brand niches and nuances. This thoughtful mix helps reach the right audiences without missing out on potential high-value customers that could have otherwise been lost if the focus remained only on brand safety measures like block lists or exclusion lists.
- Privacy-focused: An ideal fit for the cookieless future, contextual intelligence does not leverage any third-party data. The audience targeting is solely based on the analysis of webpage content and context to determine all factors from user intent and relevance to brand safety and suitability.
As businesses traverse through the post-cookie era, they need to find ways to adapt to the privacy-first world. Contextual AI is here to stay as it fits the bill. It does not depend on any third-party cookies and enables brands to reach specific customer segments while being respectful of their privacy, and mindful of brand safety, and suitability.
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