Your Audience Isn’t Who You Think It Is

For years, digital marketers have trusted that their audience targeting tools “just work.” That if you selected “Women 18–24” or “Parents with Kids,” your media would magically reach exactly that. But what if we told you that wasn’t true? That targeting, as we know it, is largely make-believe?

At Adlook, we ran a study across 1,300 real users—and the results were hard to ignore.

When targeting “Women 18–24,” 43% of impressions went to men, and only 18% reached the intended group. When using third-party data to find “Parents,” 66% of people reached didn’t have children. Even more telling: “Men” and “Women” audience segments overlapped by 35%.

This isn’t just about precision—it’s about a foundational disconnect between how we define audiences and how those audiences actually behave. And with cookies disappearing, identifiers weakening, and privacy expectations rising, it’s time for a different approach.

Context Is the New Currency

What comes next isn’t about swapping one opaque system for another. It’s about shifting from assumptions to observable intent. From who people are thought to be, to what they’re engaging with right now.

Thanks to advances in language modelling and deep learning, we can now interpret meaning within content—not just detect keywords or tags. Instead of categorising a page as “Food & Drink,” we identify it as “high-protein diet planning for active runners.” Instead of “Entertainment,” we understand “football fan commentary on transfer strategies.”

And this isn’t abstract. In one of our recent tests, contextual targeting based on real content signals identified skincare-interested users with 49.2% accuracy—substantially outperforming traditional third-party audience vendors.

In a world where IDs are fading fast, relevance lives in the context.

CTV: Where Context Matters Most

Nowhere is this shift more urgent than in Connected TV.

On the surface, CTV seems like the dream environment: full-screen, high-attention, premium content. But behind the scenes, targeting is riddled with challenges. Devices are shared. Inventory is fragmented. And meaningful user-level data is rarely available.

This is why contextual targeting isn’t just useful in CTV—it’s essential.

By analysing the content being viewed—genre, tone, themes, even cultural relevance—we can align messaging to the moment, not just the metadata. Context gives marketers a way to plan across web, mobile and CTV using one consistent framework: what people are watching, reading, and reacting to in real time.

And when that content is live sport? The emotional intensity, timing and cultural resonance elevate everything.