As privacy regulations tighten and ID-based targeting becomes harder to scale, marketers are revisiting an approach that once defined digital media buying: contextual targeting. In the U.S. alone, the contextual advertising market is expected to grow from $197.9 billion in 2025 to an astounding $799 billion by 2034.
The reasons behind this exceptional growth rate have a lot to do with the fact that the 2025 version of contextual advertising looks nothing like its early-2000s ancestor.
Modern contextual targeting is no longer limited to matching an ad to the words or images on a page. Modern contextual marketing connects what a person is consuming with who is most likely to engage, all without relying on cookies or personal identifiers. The result is a new class of precision tools known as contextual audiences.
From page-level matching to contextual audiences
Traditional contextual targeting was straightforward: find a page about a topic, run an ad related to that topic, and hope for relevance. It treated all viewers of that page as equal, regardless of their actual interests or intent.
Today’s contextual audiences take a more advanced approach. By analyzing patterns of content consumption over time, they identify audiences whose behaviors and interests align with a campaign’s objectives—then find those audiences wherever relevant content appears.
The difference is more than technical. For campaign planners, this approach unlocks the ability to blend the best elements of audience targeting and contextual relevance into one strategy, aligning who you reach with where you reach them.
The benefits of contextual audiences
When integrated into campaign planning, contextual audiences deliver a distinct set of advantages that go beyond what traditional contextual targeting could offer.
Accuracy without compromising privacy: Marketers are under pressure to prove that their targeting strategies respect user privacy while still delivering strong performance. Contextual audiences focus on the signals embedded in content engagement—topics, keywords, sentiment, and other semantic markers—rather than personal identifiers. This enables campaigns to reach people whose interests align closely with brand objectives while avoiding the compliance risks associated with tracking individuals across sites and devices. Especially for brands in highly regulated sectors, this balance is essential.
Built for a cookieless, ID-agnostic future: The gradual loss of third-party cookies and changes to mobile identifiers have forced many marketers into reactive workarounds. Contextual audiences offer a more stable, forward-looking solution. Because they don’t depend on IDs, they can be deployed across today’s media channels and remain viable as regulations and platform policies change. For campaign planners, this consistency removes a major source of uncertainty and allows long-term strategies to stay intact without costly, last-minute overhauls.
Efficiency through relevance: When ads appear alongside content that reflects a consumer’s current mindset, engagement rates tend to improve. Contextual audiences go beyond basic adjacency, allowing planners to align campaigns with the intent signaled by a user’s broader content behavior. This precision reduces wasted impressions, improves conversion metrics, and ensures media budgets work harder. In budget-conscious environments, that efficiency can make the difference between a campaign that just meets its goals and one that exceeds them.
The right place, right time, right mindset: Timing and receptivity matter as much as audience definition. Contextual audiences make it possible to reach people when they are most open to a message, whether they are researching a major purchase, reading industry news, or consuming content tied to a personal passion. Aligning creative with these high-receptivity moments not only increases the chance of immediate response but also builds brand associations that persist well beyond the click or view.
Together, these advantages position contextual audiences as a core planning tool within modern advertising campaigns.
Putting contextual audiences to work
Modern contextual audience solutions analyze vast volumes of digital content to identify the themes, topics, and semantic patterns that define a given audience. This involves both deterministic signals (content a user has engaged with) and probabilistic modeling (predicting what similar users are likely to consume next). The resulting segments can deliver both scale and precision.
Eyeota applies these principles by building contextual audiences that map shared content consumption patterns into scalable, ID-free segments. These audiences are designed for seamless activation across major platforms and channels, including display, mobile, audio, digital out-of-home, and social. By combining semantic analysis with precise classification, Eyeota delivers privacy-first targeting options that help brands connect with relevant audiences at scale while maintaining compliance and performance.
Why contextual belongs at the center of campaign planning
For years, contextual targeting was seen as a fallback: something to use when IDs weren’t available. That thinking no longer holds up.
Today’s contextual audiences combine precision, reach, efficiency, and privacy compliance in a single strategy, making them a viable starting point for planning rather than a backup plan.
Marketers who invest the time to understand and integrate these capabilities can design campaigns that perform in the present while staying resilient against future changes in addressability. As technology and partnerships continue to expand what’s possible, contextual targeting isn’t just making a comeback. It’s becoming one of the most reliable, adaptable tools in the modern media planner’s kit.
—
Marc Fanelli is SVP of Dun & Bradstreet’s digital audiences business. He leads global commercial and operations teams spanning agency sales, platform and data partnerships, account management, and digital data supply. Before joining Dun & Bradstreet through its 2021 acquisition of Eyeota, he was Eyeota’s chief operating officer.