Publishers, agencies, and brands don't always sit on the same side of the table. But at the end of the day, they're facing the same challenge.

For publishers, the question is how to create content relevant enough that brands and agencies want to advertise within it. For agencies, it's where to place their clients and which environments are truly brand safe. For brands, it's where to invest to build a closer connection with their customers. The perspectives are different, and so are the priorities. But the challenge is shared: as the way people discover information keeps evolving, quality content needs to keep being found, valued, and sustained.

That challenge was one of many conversations we brought to Barcelona. From September 15 to 17, the Seedtag Innovation Summit gathered clients and partners from the United  States, Latin America, and Europe, opening at the Joan Miró Foundation.

During the Summit, Brian Gleason, our CEO, added another layer: "We're more connected than we've ever been, but we're more distracted than we've ever been." For Brian, finding out how to connect in that moment is the most important thing, whether you're a brand, an agency, or a publisher.

The agenda combined dedicated sessions for the supply side and the demand side with joint sessions that put both in the same room. Topics ranged from the agentic shift and AI search to attention measurement, brand safety, CTV, creative, and life after the traffic. At lunches and dinners, the conversations kept going.

Across all of them, one thing became clear. The challenges facing the adtech ecosystem aren't local. They're global. And they become easier to solve when both sides look at them together.

Key Takeaways

• Consumers are more connected and more distracted than ever, and connecting with them in the moment matters for brands, agencies, and publishers alike.
• The same person makes different decisions in different situations, shaped by signals like time of day, screen, weather, and place.
• Fewer impressions carry identifiers, but audiences haven't gone anywhere, and reaching them requires a new structure.
• Interest, emotion, and intent shape how people process advertising, while viewability alone says nothing about that processing.
• Publishers, agencies, and brands face the same challenges from different perspectives, and the conversation is global, spanning the United States, Latin America, and Europe.

What Are the Biggest Challenges Facing the Digital Advertising Landscape?

Throughout the Summit, Brian Gleason put the consumer at the center of the conversation. For him, it's the one thing the industry doesn't focus on enough. We talk about acronyms, LLMs, and chats, but rarely about what consumers are doing every day or what their world is like.

And that world is full of noise. Attention is fleeting, and capturing it is hard. At the same time, clients are under pressure to grow and differentiate, and Brian raised an open question about what happens to them as products become commoditized in AI chat environments.

Grego Martínez, our Chief Product Officer, pointed to another challenge: media buying itself.

In CTV, most buying happens at the platform level, yet streaming services rarely have exclusive content. To illustrate the point, Grego shared a simple example: in Spain, Harry Potter is available on eight different platforms. So when a brand buys one of them, it's buying the service, not the moment. It learns nothing about the show being watched, the emotion it creates, or the hour and day it's being seen.

Buying through demand side platforms (DSPs) has a similar limitation. Brands and agencies can target IAB categories, keywords, domains, geography, or day part, but combining all of those signals to build moments manually is very complicated. The signals exist, but programmatic fragmentation keeps them apart.

Why the Adtech Ecosystem Is Moving From Understanding the Who to the Moment

For Grego, solving that fragmentation starts with a simple idea: the same person can make very different decisions depending on the situation they're in.

Picture someone commuting to work on a rainy Monday morning, phone in one hand, about to lose connection in five or six minutes. Any message has to be fast. Now picture the same person on a sunny Sunday morning, planning the week ahead with Monday off. They might spend 90 seconds on a powerful long video, one that takes them to the next step.

Nothing about them has changed. Only the moment has.

The same happens with a recipe. On a Tuesday evening after work, someone looking one up wants something fast. On a Saturday morning, with family and friends coming over, they're far more open to a message tied to that interest. The article is exactly the same. The moment is not.

That's why content is only one piece of context. The hour, the day of the week, and the season all matter. So do the type of screen someone is using, the weather, and the place they're in. On their own, these signals won't massively improve advertising. Combined, they create a scenario where advertising works much better.

Moments also change across environments. On mobile, things happen faster. On desktop, people are usually sitting down and paying more attention. CTV is often watched in a group rather than alone.

"We've spent more than 20 years understanding the who. Now, I think the future will be won by those who understand the moment much better," Grego said as he closed his session.

Audiences Were Never Identifiers

Hannes Sieling, our VP of Data & AI, started from programmatic advertising's long reliance on identifiers. They gave data teams structure, plus the reach to find people again. Today, fewer impressions carry them, but the reality hasn't changed. The same people are consuming the same content. And audiences were never identifiers in the first place.

What the industry needs is a new structure, built around the content people consume. That's the idea behind vector-based targeting: grouping similar content together so brands and agencies can find the environments closest to their goals, while balancing reach and precision.

Hannes also pointed to the technology that makes this possible: "Embedders are a little bit the hidden champions, the unsung heroes of the whole rise of large-language models."

The real question is what counts as similar. For him, the answer needs to go beyond clicks or categories and help find the right environment at the right moment. Understanding how people actually process what they see is a key part of that answer.

The Science Behind Attention, Emotion, and Intent

Professor Tino Meitz from the University of Münster explained how people process advertising. Who we are stays fairly stable, but how we feel and what we're focused on can change in milliseconds. When people consume media or advertising, that state of mind matters most.

That's also why viewability isn't enough. It shows that an ad could be seen, but says nothing about whether it was actually processed.

Three contextual signals shape that processing:

• Interest: If people aren't motivated to watch a show, they're unlikely to engage with the advertising within it.
• Emotion and affect: The brain relates new situations to past experiences, so a context that connects to familiar feelings makes new information easier to process.
• Intent: People need to be in the right situation for a message. If you want to buy a mid-sized SUV, you probably won't walk into a Ferrari dealership.

Tino was careful to separate affect from emotion: "Affect is something you can't govern. It's something that's happening, it's also, to a certain extent unconscious. Emotion is an evaluation of your affect afterwards."

How Can Supply and Demand Collaborate Across the Adtech Ecosystem?

Rob Beeler, who led the Two Sides, One Signal working session, explained why collaboration and supply and demand alignment matter. “Both sides are trying to solve the same things. This is a relationship-driven industry, and relationships are built by talking to each other in person. When both sides start working together, he said, they can be more effective for advertisers”, he said.

Kevin Donker, Head of Programmatic & Media Automation at Omnicom Media, brought that same spirit to the agentic conversation. For Kevin, agentic buying is still in its infancy, and the industry will have to come together to adopt protocols that make it reliable. When that happens, the productivity gains from AI should be reinvested in people.

In his view, the winners will be organizations that use AI to boost creativity, leadership, and judgment. The ones left behind will simply put an AI layer on top of an already fragmented workflow.

Brian Gleason echoed that idea in his closing remarks. He pointed to the feedback shared over the three days on different ways of working, ad inventory sources, and ways to measure. He also stressed the importance of trust: when you know you can trust someone, you know they'll do what they say they're going to do.

"There are a lot of pressures and challenges we think about in the world, and the things we shared over the last few days were brilliant. That's what we love to do: share information. It's an ecosystem that works together, and that's what we're trying to create", Brian Gleason. 

How Does Neuro-Contextual Advertising Bridge the Gap Between Supply and Demand?

If both sides face the same challenge, they also need a shared way to understand the moment. That's what Neuro-Contextual Advertising offers.

Liz, our Neuro-Contextual AI, reads signals of interest, emotion, and intent to understand the moment behind each impression, without personal data or identifiers. For brands and agencies, that means reaching people when it matters most. For publishers, it means their content is valued for the moments it creates.

And it goes beyond advertising. Bringing value back to the open web helps keep quality content alive, and that's a responsibility the whole industry shares.

From Barcelona to the Next Conversation

Over three days, publishers, agencies, and brands from the United States, Latin America, and Europe approached the same questions from different perspectives. How do we capture attention? How do we reach audiences without identifiers? How do we make sure quality content keeps being found and valued as the way people discover information changes?

For us, at Seedtag, those conversations reinforce the vision behind Neuro-Contextual Advertising: understanding people's interest, emotion, and intent in the moment they're in.

It's not about knowing who. It's about understanding the moment.

Thank you to everyone who joined us in Barcelona. If you'd like to keep the conversation going, our team is here.