Why the Future of Ad Targeting Is About Context, Not Cookies | Brendan Norman, Classify

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Ads don’t need to follow people to perform. 

They need to understand the moment. Kevin sits down with Brendan Norman, founder of Classify and former leader at Facebook Audience Network, to unpack how AI-driven contextual 3.0 finally lets the open web match social platforms for precision. Instead of broad categories and brittle keyword lists, today’s systems read full pages like humans do: entities, sentiment, tone, and brand mentions captured as vectors, then retrieved with natural language to find the exact URLs where your message fits.

We dig into why the old ad tech “pipes” kept contextual stuck at 1.0—and how the Ad Context Protocol (inspired by Anthropic’s MCP) is standardizing secure connections between data providers, DSPs, SSPs, agencies, and creative tools. 

That foundation enables agentic workflows: automated buyers negotiating prices, testing creative, and optimizing placement while humans set strategy. Expect real lifts in CTR and suitability as spammy, bot-heavy pages get filtered out and high-quality placements rise to the top.

The conversation also tackles the privacy question head-on. Targeting pages rather than identities aligns ads with what users are focused on right now, enhancing relevance without surveillance. Brendan shares practical examples from niche outdoor gear to B2B use cases where consumer content becomes the perfect context for business messaging. 

We close with what marketers should do today: learn the new query language of vectors, pilot agentic bidding, demand quality and fraud signals, and prepare for SMB-friendly tools that democratize advanced targeting. If you care about performance, privacy, and real relevance, this is your roadmap.

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