Seedtag’s Brian Danzis explains how neuro-contextual advertising could reshape how brands can bring back the soul of advertising to gain an edge in a signal-light future.
Seedtag at Advertising Week New York
In a week where AI, automation, data, placements and precision dominated the chatter at Advertising Week New York, a line from Brian Danzis, global chief revenue officer at Seedtag, stood out. Speaking with The Drum as part of our Media that Moves video series, he said: “We really do want to bring back the soul of advertising.”
It was a line that led to neuro-contextual advertising – a technology that aims to go beyond keywords, cookies and even basic intent signals. It’s built to understand not just what someone is reading, but why they’re there and how they feel, using a linguistic technique to understand the root word and what it could actually mean.
“Sometimes we get obsessed with thinking about targeting tactics and media placements and forget about what we're trying to do,” he says. “And that is to convince people to buy something or change their perception about a particular topic.”
Unlike classic contextual targeting, which matches ads to keywords or topics, neuro-contextual models bring in intention and emotion. It can detect whether someone is reading for information, entertainment or action – and crucially, how the language makes them feel. “What we’re trying to understand is: how does content make someone feel, predict it and then strive for those types of characteristics like curiosity, happiness and other types of human emotions,” he says.
That emotional layer is what makes the shift so significant. With advertisers under pressure to reach people without overstepping, this connective tissue “cuts through and captures the essence of who people are, and aligns their interests in a way that can be energized around their values and their morals and what’s important to them, their ethics,” he adds.
And as marketers look to do more with less data, this isn’t just a technology story. It’s a creative one. A strategic one. A human one. If neuro-contextual signals can help campaigns find the right moments and mindsets, without relying on invasive tracking then, as Danzis hints, that could reawaken what advertising was always meant to do: move people.
Watch the full episode of Media That Moves to hear Danzis’s vision for bringing emotion back to the center of modern marketing.
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About us: Seedtag is the leading Contextual Advertising Company that creates highly impactful and engaging solutions for relevant premium visual content, powering...