Contextual Targeting Gains Ground in CTV: Magnite’s Ryan Kenney

Why It Matters

The shift enables advertisers to reach engaged TV audiences while complying with privacy regulations, reshaping how media spend is allocated in the CTV ecosystem.

Key Takeaways

• Contextual targeting solves CTV privacy challenges.
• Magnite's AI tool standardizes IAB‑approved content tags.
• User‑ID targeting ineffective in shared living‑room TV.
• Context drives both brand safety and performance outcomes.
• Metadata becomes new currency for privacy‑first advertising.

Pulse Analysis

The rapid adoption of contextual targeting in Connected TV reflects a broader industry pivot away from cookie‑based identification toward privacy‑compliant relevance. As households increasingly consume content on shared screens, traditional user‑level data loses granularity, prompting advertisers to align messages with the shows, genres, or live events that viewers actively choose. This alignment not only respects privacy norms but also taps into the heightened emotional engagement that comes from passionate fandoms, delivering higher recall and brand affinity.

Standardization has long been a barrier to scaling contextual buys, with disparate tagging systems and inconsistent taxonomies hampering seamless activation. Magnite’s AI‑driven normalization platform addresses this friction by translating disparate publisher metadata into a unified, IAB‑approved framework. The result is a streamlined workflow where planners can programmatically select inventory based on clean, comparable categories, reducing operational overhead and accelerating campaign launch times. This technological leap is encouraging more media owners to expose their content signals, expanding the pool of inventory available for context‑driven campaigns.

Beyond brand safety, contextual signals are now proving their worth as performance drivers. When ads appear alongside content that resonates with the audience—such as live sports, cultural moments, or niche genre programming—viewers are more likely to engage, translating into measurable outcomes like lift in brand recall and conversion rates. In a landscape where first‑party data is scarce, metadata becomes the new currency, allowing advertisers to craft precise, outcome‑focused media plans without compromising user privacy. As the ecosystem matures, contextual targeting is set to become the cornerstone of CTV strategy, balancing relevance, efficiency, and compliance.

Original Description

LAS VEGAS – Contextual signals are becoming central to how connected TV inventory is bought and sold, as advertisers look for relevance at scale without relying on user identifiers. Ryan Kenney, senior vice president of revenue for SpringServe at Magnite, said viewer choice and passion for content make context a natural fit for the TV environment.

“In normal consumption of CTV, viewers are selecting the shows they’re passionate about,” Kenney said in an interview with Beet.TV contributor David Kaplan. “And it’s no secret that buyers prefer to target that way as well.”

Challenges of standardization in contextual buying

Kenney said contextual targeting in CTV has long faced structural and operational hurdles. Media owners must identify and tag content, then pass those signals to buyers, often using different systems and taxonomies that aren’t consistent with recommendations by the Interactive Advertising Bureau. That lack of consistency has slowed adoption.

“Historically, media owners have different ways of tagging their content and passing it through,” he said. “It’s non-standardized, it doesn’t align with the IAB and it creates a ton of operational challenges.”

To address that, Magnite recently released an AI-powered tool designed to normalize content signals. Kenney said the system groups publisher signals into standardized, IAB-approved categories, making them easier for buyers and planners to activate.

“We’ve seen that really help remove some of those challenges and nuances for advertisers,” he added.

Why user-based targeting struggles on TV

Kenney said the TV environment does not lend itself to the user-based targeting models that defined digital advertising for years. In living rooms, content is often consumed by multiple viewers at once, making individual identifiers less useful.

“In TV scenarios, you have an audience, you have multiple viewers,” he said. “The cookies and mobile device IDs that benefited individual executions just aren’t available when we’re talking about television.”

As a result, both publishers and advertisers are leaning into content context to shape media plans and connect with viewers. Programmatic tools now allow those signals to be applied in real time, improving relevance without compromising privacy.

From brand safety to performance driver

Contextual targeting has traditionally been associated with brand safety, but Kenney said its role is expanding into performance.

“Contextual will always have a brand safety element,” he said. “But it’s definitely progressing beyond just that. It’s starting to turn into a mechanism to help reach outcomes.”

When ads align closely with the content viewers care about, he said, they become more memorable and effective. “Those are more meaningful moments where the audience is engaged and leaned in,” Kenney said. “That’s where it starts to drive outcomes.”

Metadata becomes a new currency

In a privacy-first landscape, Kenney described content metadata as an increasingly valuable form of currency for advertisers. While the importance of any data depends on campaign goals, he said contextual signals stand out because they deliver relevance without personal identifiers.

“You can’t understate the value of relevancy and engagement from the viewer,” Kenney said. Cultural moments, live sports and highly passionate fan bases, he added, are where advertisers see the strongest recall and impact.

Bringing viewer passion into media planning

Buying against shows, genres and live events helps brands mirror how audiences actually consume TV, Kenney said. Viewers choose content based on what matters most to them and who they are watching with.

“For brands, it’s about factoring in those consumption habits and selecting the type of media they’re willing to invest in,” he said. “That’s when you see high alignment, relevancy and ultimately the greatest impact.”