Creator marketing isn’t the only part of advertising being rebuilt. As privacy pressure grows and buyers question the value of raw impressions, contextual targeting is getting a second life, this time with an emotional layer.

Seedtag is betting that the next step isn’t just placing ads next to relevant content, but placing them in moments that match how someone feels. Brian Gleason, CEO of Seedtag, calls the company’s approach “neuro-contextual AI,” during a recent episode of "Behind the Numbers," designed to “analyze moments that are emotionally connected, that are contextually relevant and that drives more relevance, more performance for brands in a privacy compliant way."

The pitch is to make advertising feel less like surveillance and more like a well-timed conversation.

Attention is the entry point

Gleason framed attention as a moment of receptivity.

“Attention is… 'Did you capture someone?'" he said. "Did someone stop and take note of whatever’s going on? Did you stop me from doing anything else I was doing to take note of what’s going on in that moment?”

Our analyst Jeremy Goldman positioned attention as a response to the industry’s overreliance on impressions as a proxy for impact.

“We’re just going to get you a whole bunch of impressions and… assume that every single impression is created equal when we all know that that is not the case,” Goldman said. “If not all impressions are created equal, why do I want to pay for them on a per thousand basis?”

Gleason argued attention is foundational, but incomplete on its own.

“You’ve got my attention, what do you do with it?” he said. The next layer is whether the message connects emotionally in the context where it appears.

Neuro-contextual is contextual targeting with an emotional match

Gleason described Seedtag’s research as a pivot away from traditional performance measures and toward what happens in the brain when context and emotion align.

“We partnered with key institutions to be able to come up and say, okay, how do we even measure this?” he said. The study evaluated engagement using “cross-brain activity” and measured emotional connection using “a frontal lobe alpha asymmetry” approach.

For Gleason, the headline finding was lift in recall when the ad environment matched the emotional tone of the creative.

“We see a 350% increase in recall,” he said, when an ad is “neuro-contextually relevant” versus a non-contextual segment. Against a contextual segment, Gleason said recall was “a 31%” lift.

He framed the difference using a simple contrast: being on a sports page is contextual. But pairing the right emotion, like nostalgia, inside that environment is what unlocks impact.

“If I’m in a sports page… and the advertisement is nostalgic… that’s the unlock,” he said.

The point isn’t that contextual targeting is new. It’s that context alone can be too broad. Neuro-contextual aims to match creative, environment, and mood.

“It’s trying to say, how do I make sure that I can match the creative with the environment, with the mood or the tonality when somebody’s looking at that environment,” Gleason said.

Privacy-first doesn’t have to feel like a downgrade

Neuro-contextual is also positioned as an answer to the post-cookie era. But Gleason’s argument wasn’t just about compliance, it was about rebuilding trust.

“We made some mistakes… We had this new tool, it was the cookie… but the challenge with that tool is we overused it,” he said. “We chased everybody all over the web and it got to the point where you’re like, stop."

That history shaped how consumers experience much of digital advertising today.

“When we were chasing people, we didn’t necessarily care how they felt,” Gleason said.

He described behavioral targeting as attention-grabbing in the wrong way, interruptive and intrusive, versus the goal of contextual as conversational.

“If you’re going to have a conversation one-to-one with someone, [it’s] different than you have a conversation in a large crowd,” he said.

Seedtag’s broader claim is that privacy-first advertising can be more effective if it’s built around interest and emotion instead of identifiers.

“There’s a better way to do this,” Gleason said. The aim is to help planners build “emotional intelligence” into targeting, optionally layered with behavioral signals.

Listen to the full episode.

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