Neuro-Contextual Advertising Signals the Post-Cookie Future of Attention

As cookies and identifiers continue to fade, a new frontier is emerging in digital advertising—one powered not by who users are, but by how they feel. New research from Seedtag suggests that neuro-contextual advertising, which aligns ads with emotional context and intent rather than personal data, is driving significantly higher attention and engagement across CTV and the open web. In a conversation with Street Fight, Seedtag CEO Brian Gleason explains why AI-driven emotional intelligence may become the next foundational planning layer for advertisers navigating privacy, performance, and scale in the years ahead.

Against this backdrop of declining identifiers and rising attention-based measurement, your study claims claims that Neuro-Contextual ads drive 3.5x higher neural engagement. Can you unpack what “neural engagement” means in practical terms for advertisers?

To put it simply, in neuroscience, neural engagement is a measure of how actively viewers’ brains respond to a stimulus. In the context of an ad, high neural engagement indicates that the audience is paying attention, emotionally connecting with the message, and forming lasting impressions.

This is where attention begins translating into outcomes advertisers care about.

How does it translate into real-world performance metrics like recall, click-throughs, or conversions?

In advertising, neural engagement has been linked to measurable outcomes such as stronger recall and increased sales. Cross Brain Correlation (CBC) measures how similarly people’s brains respond to the same content. Research shows that high neuro-similarity can predict both memory retention and downstream performance for media campaigns — driving stronger memory and behavioral impact.

Our neuroscience study shows that Neuro-Contextual advertising significantly boosts neuro-similarity. This means that ads placed in environments closely aligned with a viewer’s specific interests, emotions, and intentions, and not just the general topic, perform better. By raising the standard for contextual fit, Neuro-Contextual campaigns not only enhance performance metrics like recall and engagement but also create a deeper, more authentic connection with the audience.

How does Seedtag’s AI, Liz, actually understand emotional tone and intent in content?

Our Neuro-Contextual AI, Liz, goes beyond keywords or categories to understand how content makes people feel and what’s driving their underlying motivations. Instead of simply labeling content by topic, she looks at the full context of an article or video to understand deeper signals of interest, emotions, and intentions in real time.

Is it possible to tell where context and emotion can vary by region or culture?

Yes, context and emotion are deeply shaped by cultural and regional nuances. The same content can evoke different emotions or intentions depending on local norms, language, social dynamics, or even current events. That’s why it’s critical for our AI to understand not just content, but how it’s interpreted in different cultural and situational contexts, helping brands communicate in ways that feel locally relevant, respectful, and authentic.

How does Neuro-Contextual advertising adapt to local contexts, language nuances, or regional emotional cues?

Our AI, Liz, analyses over 60 million URLs daily across the open web and CTV, understanding content in more than 10 languages. In doing so, she learns how meaning, tone, and emotional signals vary by region. This allows her to understand local language nuances, cultural references, and audience behaviors.

In 2025, we launched Seedtag Local in Australia, giving retailers a tech-driven platform to plan, optimize, and report campaigns on a per-store basis, all while remaining fully aligned with evolving data privacy standards. This is just one example of how Neuro-Contextual is bridging the gap between privacy and local precision.

What role does neuroscience play in helping brands make the leap from demographic or behavioral targeting to something that still feels precise and measurable?

Neuroscience gives brands a predictive and privacy-first way to understand how ads will resonate at scale. It can provide rich insights into campaign performance even before media spend begins. By measuring universal brain responses, it explains why an ad performs — such as emotional engagement or cognitive ease — not just whether it performs.

Moreover, neuroscience doesn’t require knowing who a person is. It measures how the brain responds, not whose brain it is, making it inherently privacy-first. This allows brands to move beyond demographics or past behavior to a more precise, measurable, and human approach to targeting.

How do you think mobile’s “close-range” context changes how people emotionally process ads?

Mobile creates a more intimate, close-range environment where attention and emotional response are heightened. Our research showed that Neuro-Contextual ads generate 15% higher attention on mobile compared to non-contextual ads, emphasizing the importance of personal relevance and emotional fit in this space.

How should local marketers use that insight?

Local marketers can apply this insight by using emotion to guide smarter ad placement, rather than just creating eye-catching creatives. Mobile, in particular, drives stronger attention than desktop, making it an even more powerful environment for emotionally aligned campaigns. By prioritizing emotional and contextual alignment, campaigns feel less intrusive, more engaging, and more effective in high-intent moments.

If we imagine the future of advertising five years from now, do you see “neuro-contextual” becoming a standard planning layer and replacing behavioral targeting altogether?

I see Neuro-Contextual becoming a core planning layer for every campaign, providing deeper insights into audiences, competitors, and optimization. Emotional context is emerging as the most scalable, predictive, and brand-safe signal in advertising.

As advertising moves beyond personal data, brands must rethink how they plan and place media. Context alone is no longer enough — the next evolution is Neuro-Contextual, aligning brand messages with consumers’ interests, emotions, and intentions. Ads that feel native to their emotional environment are processed faster, trusted more, and remembered longer.

As AI continues to advance at a pace we couldn’t have imagined just a few years ago, its capabilities will expand exponentially over the next five years, further strengthening Neuro-Contextual intelligence and its impact on the market.