Why the Future of Ad Targeting Is About Context vs. Cookies | Brendan Norman, Classify

We have spent the last decade obsessed with "who" is looking at the screen. But as cookies die and privacy regulations tighten, the smart money is moving to "what" is on the screen.

In this episode of Tech Marketing Rewired, Kevin sits down with Brendan Norman, former Facebook ad tech leader and founder of Classify, to discuss the shift from tracking people to reading "deep context."

Brendan explains that we are entering "Contextual 3.0"—an era where AI doesn’t just scan for keywords, but reads sentiment, emotion, and nuance to place ads with surgical precision. We also dive into why the "plumbing" of the ad tech industry is broken and how a new "Agentic Web" will allow AI to negotiate ad buys automatically.

Chapters:
0:00 Smarter Bidding Agents Emerge
0:30 Host Intro And Episode Setup
2:06 Brendan’s Path Through Ad Tech
3:29 The Problem That Sparked Classify
6:20 Contextual 1.0 To 3.0
9:21 Quality Signals Beyond Keywords
10:55 Bot Traffic And Brand Safety
16:27 Fixing The Ad Tech Plumbing
18:05 The Ad Context Protocol And MCP
20:20 Agentic Buying And Creative Selection
23:12 Unified Chat Interfaces For Media Teams
24:39 Who Drives Agentic Innovation
26:06 Go-To-Market: Supply And Demand Sides
28:18 Early Results And Performance Lift
29:54 Democratizing Targeting For SMBs
32:07 What Marketers Should Do Now
33:49 AI Roulette: Is Contextual Privacy Theater
37:05 Guardrails, Rights, And High-Quality Content

In this episode, you’ll discover:
→ Contextual 3.0: Why targeting is moving from simple keywords to AI that reads "sentiment and vectors".
→ The "Broken Plumbing" of AdTech: Why legacy infrastructure is like "old lead pipes" and how protocols like MCP are fixing it.
→ Privacy vs. Surveillance: Why contextual targeting is safer than behavioral tracking—and why it might actually perform better.
→ The Agentic Future: How AI agents will soon talk to other AI agents to buy and sell media for you.

Connect with Brendan:
LinkedIn:   / brendannorman  
Classify: https://tryclassify.com/

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#AdTech #ContextualAdvertising #AI #Marketing #Privacy #Classify #Programmatic #Cookieless