At this year’s Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, amid sun-soaked terraces and industry-wide discussions about the future of advertising, one theme overtook all conversations at the Croisette: redefining relevance through deeper user understanding. For Seedtag, Cannes 2025 marked the opportunity to return to the French Riviera and bring forward the future of artificial intelligence for marketing: neuro-contextual advertising.
Built on the idea that context is no longer enough, neuro-contextual advertising moves beyond static classifications and towards cognitive intelligence - interpreting real-time signals of interest, emotion, and intent to connect with people in more meaningful, privacy-first ways.
Defining the New Era Through Emotion, Intention, and Intelligence
Seedtag recently unveiled its new positioning by championing a model that resonates far beyond keywords or audiences. Focusing on more than just data, but on better understanding on how people feel, why they care, and what drives their decisions in the moment.
From the stage to the shoreline, our team helped define this new era of contextual advertising - one powered by neuroscience principles and made scalable by Agentic AI. Seedtag’s neuro-contextual intelligence connects not only content and creativity, but also emotion and cognition, bringing brands closer to the real drivers of consumer behavior.
In a marketplace seeking relevance without compromise, Seedtag’s approach stands as one built for privacy, designed for outcomes and powered by understanding.
A Crossover to Tune Into: AdTech Heroes x The Pub Way
One of the highlights of the week was the special crossover episode of our two flagship podcasts: AdTech Heroes x The Pub Way – Winning Audiences in a New Era of Engagement. Hosted live at The Drum’s podcast studio, the session brought together voices from across the ecosystem to answer a timely question: how can brands and publishers use real-time context and AI to engage audiences more effectively, while prioritizing passions over profiles, and meaning over assumption?
Moderated by Seedtag’s Tina Iannacchino and Marko Johns, the conversation featured Jamie Dunlop, Managing Partner at MediaPlus UK, and Tony Gemma, VP Global Head of Creative at Yahoo. Together, they unpacked the shifts in strategy required to meet audiences where they are, not demographically but behaviorally and emotionally.
Jamie unpacked how MediaPlus moved beyond demographic targeting to focus on real human behavior, arguing that knowing how people think and feel is more important than knowing who they are. “Demographics treat Prince Charles and Ozzy Osbourne as the same person,” he said. “They’re not.”
Tony, from Yahoo, made the case that the creative side of programmatic has long been neglected. “Programmatic forgot to bring its creative friend along,” he noted. The group agreed that while media and data have advanced, creativity often lags behind. The takeaway? Brands that succeed are the ones reuniting data, creative, and context while treating creative as a measurable driver of outcomes, not just a finishing touch.
From personalization at scale to creativity that aligns with intent, the conversation reflected an industry yearning for a system that doesn’t just automate targeting but understands people and delivers campaigns that connect.
Elevating Brands with Purposeful Technology
AI was examined with depth, especially in terms of its role in shaping more intelligent, ethical advertising. As Mike Villalobos, SVP of Strategy North America, noted during the AI in Action panel hosted by Sigma Software, AWS, and Ipsos:
“AI isn't a feature, but rather a core part of our foundation to accelerate and sustain our growth.”
That sentiment was echoed across the festival. The conversation has clearly shifted from curiosity around AI to a firm expectation that it delivers measurable value. The bar is no longer automation. Neuro-contextual delivers on that expectation by integrating neuroscience insights with real-time emotional understanding. It’s not just about being faster. It’s about being smarter and enabling marketers to activate campaigns that align with how people actually feel and think, in the moment.
This theme of thoughtful progress was also front and center in Cannes Truth Be Told, a panel exploring the monetization of journalism hosted by Unplugged Collective and Beeler.Tech. Representing Seedtag, Tina Iannacchino, VP of Publisher Partnerships North America, addressed the challenge of balancing brand safety with media responsibility.
“In today’s ad tech ecosystem, quality journalism is often caught in the crossfire of rigid brand safety measures.”
Keyword blocklists, while designed to protect brands, frequently end up demonetizing essential reporting on politics, conflict, or climate. That creates a disconnect where high-value editorial content is excluded from media plans, while sensational or low-quality content remains monetized.
Advertisers must move beyond blanket controls and toward more intelligent, context-aware solutions. Only then can we ensure brand safety without undermining trusted journalism.
And in a forward-looking conversation hosted by VaynerX, Seedtag’s Global Chief Revenue Officer Brian Danzis, joined executives from VaynerMedia and Digiday’s Editor-in-Chief Jim Cooper, to explore how AI is reshaping the media ecosystem. The panel challenged the industry to cut through the noise and focus on real use cases that are actively changing how content is created, distributed, and monetized.
The group discussed how AI is helping companies rethink how they reach audiences, make decisions, and define success. One example shared during the session was United Airlines’ recent campaign with Seedtag. By combining contextual AI with high-impact formats, the campaign reached premium audiences in brand-safe environments, without relying on personal data. The result? A measurable boost in attention and engagement, proving that relevance and performance can go hand in hand in a privacy-first world.
As Brian highlighted:
“Relevance drives cognition, interest, emotion and intent. That is what neuro-contextual means, and it is leading us into the new era of advertising.”
Together, these conversations reflected a broader shift at Cannes Lions this year: toward solutions that not only perform, but reflect the values and complexity of the audiences they aim to serve.
Seedtag in the Spotlight: A Full Week of Industry Impact
From private roundtables on brand safety and media integrity, to our collaboration with HUMAN for the “Collective Apéro,” Seedtag showed up to Cannes ready to share how brands, agencies and publishers worldwide can embrace the new era of digital advertising.
Whether joining VaynerMedia on stage for a sunset conversation on AI’s future in media, or exploring how to balance personalization with accountability on Île Sainte-Marguerite, our team helped shape the conversations that will guide the next wave of marketing strategy.
While the industry has long relied on contextual targeting for privacy-first reach, Seedtag’s conversations at Cannes showed how far we’ve come. Today’s marketers are looking for relevance that adapts, moment by moment, to the emotional and cognitive state of the consumer.
Seedtag’s neuro-contextual system is built to do just that. Through dynamic semantic embeddings and continuous network-level analysis, our proprietary AI Liz delivers scalable understanding of what moves people. Whether in a premium CTV environment or across the open web, campaigns adapt in real time to changing intent, interest, and emotional tone.
It’s strategic evolution - meeting the moment when creativity, audience mindset, and media come together.
From launching our latest Contextual TV capabilities to showcasing our AI Intention Models and real-time contextual insights platform, Seedtag’s presence reflected our ambition: to make advertising work better by understanding more deeply.
Engagement, Intelligence, and the Industry We Want
As Cannes Lions 2025 came to a close, one thing was clear: the most effective campaigns are no longer the ones that shout the loudest, but the ones that understand the audience most deeply.
If AI was the buzzword of the week, emotional relevance was the quiet headline underneath. And neuro-contextual advertising is where those two forces meet: scalable intelligence grounded in how people actually think, feel, and decide.
Discover more about neuro-contextual targeting and Seedtag’s vision for AI-powered advertising here:
Contextual AI·Neuro-Contextual
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