When Brian Gleason was CRO and president of retail media at Criteo, he was all fired up about retail media.
Now Gleason, who joined contextual ad platform Seedtag as CEO earlier this month, says he believes contextual ad targeting is “an even bigger opportunity.”
Marketers, he said, are ready to reembrace advertising’s roots.
“We’ve become so hyper-focused on cookies and targeting that we lost what advertising really was about: connection,” Gleason said.
And when it comes to connecting with audiences, what truly matters is attention and emotion, he said, signals that can’t be captured by cookies or traditional content taxonomies. But agentic AI tools can surface deeper insights in a way that can be activated by ad tech.
Seedtag, for example, acquired video-focused SSP Beachfront last year to enable its AI agent, Liz, to target audiences on CTV and the open web based on context and emotional resonance.
Gleason spoke to AdExchanger.
AdExchanger: How big is Seedtag’s business and how big is the opportunity in contextual?
BRIAN GLEASON: Contextual as a category is probably $250 billion to $350 billion. It took a lot to rip me away from commerce media, because I love that space, but this was an even bigger opportunity.
Seedtag is already scaled globally. We’re in 17 different markets and connected to over 16,000 pubs. The business started in Madrid but entered the US two years ago, and we grew 120% last year in the US. In EMEA last quarter, we grew over 30%.
What are Seedtag’s top priorities?
First is introducing this concept of neurocontextual targeting, which lets you connect around emotion, attention and interest. Contextual used to just look at keywords and categories, and Seedtag was one of the first to build a solution around that. Now we’ve got our artificial intelligence platform, Liz.
Job No. 2 is continuing to scale in the US and across all our markets. And last is going cross-channel and building out our capabilities in CTV. Because even though it’s a growing category, we’re limited in what we can do with contextual in CTV.
Should we expect any major changes in Seedtag’s direction under your leadership?
There won’t be a fundamental change, but with my background, there are areas that we could scale and accelerate.
Our relationships with brands are incredibly important. Expanding our footprint with more publisher supply, specifically in CTV, is also important. And there’s the agency connection. I spent 10 years at WPP and have great relationships with Publicis, Omnicom and others. Integrating our tools into their planning systems is something we can accelerate.
What are your priorities for helping publishers monetize more effectively?
I started my career in publishing, and it’s about understanding the value of the relationship you have with the consumer, then figuring out how to get the maximum value from that relationship. You need to not just have a targeting mechanism based on an audience, but to bring relevancy to the content by understanding it. Our Liz agent will help publishers better understand their content and the emotional connection.
There’s an emerging vision that programmatic advertising will eventually become a buy-side AI agent communicating with a sell-side AI agent. Is that how you see the market evolving?
I don’t know if they’re going to be separate agents on both sides. How many different agents can anybody operate?
There’s got to be connectivity between those two worlds, and it’s not easy to bring them together. But there will be a few players that come out on top. Meta’s your pathway into social. Google’s got their pathway in Performance Max. We want to be the pathway that connects the buy and the sell side with intelligence that spans both sides.
But how do you create the ability to do that not just in isolation on one channel, but with scale that really matters? That’s what makes this opportunity so exciting.
We hear complaints all the time about black-box systems and unaccountable algorithms. Isn’t there a risk that by embracing agentic AI we end up making the black-box problem worse?
It’s absolutely true. Transparency, brand safety and privacy have to be the basic foundations for anything we do. Be completely transparent with the inventory and where ads are running, and also in how you show outcomes.
It can’t just be technology talking to technology. We have to bring people along the journey and help clients understand AI: Here are the models, how they work, how you can customize them and how they surface the emotional connection.
Given the blurring lines between DSPs and SSPs, where does Seedtag fit in the marketplace? Could it become an end-to-end platform?
No. We have an exchange where our inventory is available, and we’re going to continue to build that out.
However anybody wants to buy, we want to we make our intelligence accessible to that buying path. The agentic frontend with Liz will be the main point of activation, but if you want to use a traditional DSP to activate campaigns through our exchange, there’s a pathway to do that.
Any plans for Seedtag to work with retail and commerce media platforms, specifically Criteo?
If I’m thinking about commerce and neurocontextual, well, emotion is brand recall. Imagine taking an emotional signal, marrying that to a contextual target and purchase intent, and then moving that up and down the funnel.
We’d love to have that conversation with everybody, including Criteo.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
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