• by Micheal P. Gumbert , March 13, 2025

Medtronic’s Senior Paid Media Specialist writes “In a private world where behavior cannot be tracked, we will need to use context to target, listen to our audience, and gain back their trust.”

My son loves Harry Potter, in fact every year it is tradition that we rewatch the ENTIRE movies series as a family. Both my wife and him absolutely love the movies so I endure watching the movies year after year. But here is the thing we watch these movies on my account so now I get served ad after ad about Harry Potter despite the fact that I am not the Harry Potter fan in the family. Context could have been used to figure out that my son and wife were Harry Potter fans.

We use context everyday …we use it while driving and we use it every time we communicate. How do we know to use this word instead of another one? How do we know to wear a suit or a t-shirt to a restaurant? Context is how we know these things because context is the ability to connect all the things we have learned and experienced to form a single body of knowledge. We use context in marketing as well, in fact in marketing if content is King then context is Queen. Context can go anywhere and do everything you need it to. The question becomes for us as marketers, how do we use context better to guide our marketing?

First, we need to define our terms. Contextual advertising is where we look at content looking for specific target keywords or phrases. If we find them, we know this is where we want to run our advertising. But we can go deeper and see that it means using context, or the deeper meaning of something and how these things are connected to each other. We can use these clues to figure out not just where to run our advertising, but we can learn what to say and who to say it to.

The first place to look is at our search campaigns. The keywords we use in search are contextual goldmines. Both to use for contextual targeting but also, and more importantly, to give us context about our audience. Every  search is our audience looking for answers to questions, but those questions themselves can also give us a great deal of context about our audience. Are they new to the topic or knowledgeable? Are they looking for information or are they ready to purchase? Are they looking for themselves or are they  looking for someone else? Is this a professional or personal question? All of these aspects give us important clues about our audience.

Beyond just search our other marketing can help us gather context to use with all our other marketing channels. Our display and video creatives tell us which platforms people engage with and does that change at different times of the day or year. Do they engage with digital channels all day and then not at night? Or is it the other way around? What do they like to watch? Are they watching the news or are they watching sports? All of these are signals our audience is sending us if we are paying attention enough to see and hear them. Especially when we combine this contextual data with our personas and other marketing research and data.

With privacy becoming ever more important to everyone it becomes more and more likely that privacy will end up impacting our ability to find our audiences. In a private world where every behavior cannot be tracked, we will need to use context to find our audience and then to target that audience. Context will keep becoming more, not less, important in our growing private world. Context requires that we all become marketers again by requiring us to listen to our audience and gain back their trust.

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