In this video from the TVREV In Cannes series, Mike Villalobos, Seedtag's VP of Strategy explains how contextual targeting lets them find "the white spaces" for brands and reflects on how their recent acquisition of Beachfront will allow them to do that better and more efficiently on CTV.

MIKE VILLALOBOS: Contextual really is kind of a broad-stroke approach, right, it’s looking at cohorts and just a general understanding, versus looking at a direct understanding. Instead of infringing on every page you’ve looked at as a personal user, it’s now looking at you and your cohort, or you and your interests, a cohort being a group, or a grouping of people.

It could be as niche as you want it to be but also as broad as you need it to be. That’s really what we’re focusing on: how do we give you the areas of targeting in which you didn’t know what you were missing?

For example, how does home and garden and real estate connect? For residential real estate, it could be the fact that there’s a lot of overlap, but for commercial, maybe not. Point being, we’ll find those white spaces for folks who really want to understand where the audience extends to, to catch them at the right time, at the right moment.

Most recently, we acquired Beachfront, so it’s really expanding our CTV capabilities. Beachfront is an SSP or supply side platform for connected TV or advanced TV. What we’re doing there is now providing our data intelligence with their supply and now mixing all the signals they have available to them to really produce what’s going to be a next level advancing of the advanced TV marketplace. In the next 12 months, I think we’re going to be excited to show you some of the innovations we’re coming out with.

The second [development I’m excited about] is our operating system. We launched an operating system that now helps advertisers go in a ChatGPT format. You can go in an unstructured version, so say you have 10,000 words that you just want to populate because they’re keywords from, say, search engine marketing or a full-on structured sentence. Populate that inside our engine and it’ll give you a targeting output of where the interest categories lie. More importantly, the extension of that looks like [an ability to] help people plan, have insight, and target more effectively for marketers.