- Context may become more valuable than targeting: Conversational AI shifts advertising from identifying who a consumer is to understanding what they need in the moment.
- Real-time intent is a stronger signal: AI users often state their goals, budgets, timelines and occasions directly, creating richer commercial context than inferred browsing behaviour.
- Timing drives relevance: Effective advertising increasingly depends on delivering messages when consumers are most likely to act, not simply when they fit an audience segment.
- AI could reduce irrelevant ads: Better contextual understanding may help brands advertise less often but more usefully, improving customer experience and campaign effectiveness.
- Privacy and ethics are critical: Context-aware advertising must balance relevance with trust, using strong safeguards to avoid intrusive or inappropriate marketing based on sensitive conversations. *
Last week, I sat through a product presentation that lasted 15 minutes. That, on its own, was unusual.
Anyone who has spent time in marketing has probably endured an hour-long platform demonstration involving dashboards, funnels, integrations, attribution models and enough acronyms (I hate marketing jargon) to make you wonder whether buying an ad has somehow become an engineering discipline.
The presentation was for ChatGPT Ads Manager. It was informal, practical and conversational. The hosts showed how the platform worked, demonstrated how a campaign could be built, and then it was over.
I love that the platform appears easier to use than many other digital advertising offerings, but I’m even more intrigued by the idea sitting underneath it.
The context
The advertising industry has spent the past two decades becoming extraordinarily good at answering one question: Who should see this ad?
We have built increasingly sophisticated systems around demographics, interests, search behaviour, location, browsing history, lookalike audiences, remarketing lists and purchase signals. And to be fair, much of it works remarkably well.
But watching advertising being built into a conversational AI made me wonder whether we have been over-focused on identifying the right person and under-focused on identifying the right moment.
What if the future of advertising isn’t better targeting, but better timing and better context?
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The person is only part of the equation
A potential customer is not equally valuable to an advertiser at every moment of their day. That sounds obvious, but advertising does not always behave as though it is. Knowing someone is interested in coffee is useful.
Knowing that person drives to work at 7:40 in the morning, has 20 minutes before their first meeting and is looking for somewhere nearby to stop for breakfast is considerably more useful.
The difference is context.
The same person can move through dozens of different states of intent in a single day. At 8 a.m. I may be thinking about work. At noon, lunch. At 4 pm, what I need from the grocery store. At 7 pm, where I want to go on vacation. What’s changed? Not the consumer, but the opportunity.
What makes conversational AI particularly interesting is that the customer may be volunteering much of that context directly. Someone asking an AI assistant for help planning an anniversary weekend is potentially revealing the destination, date, budget, occasion and type of experience they want.
They are not simply part of an audience segment labeled ‘travel intender’, they have described a need, and that is an entirely different quality of commercial signal.
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Radio understood the importance of the moment long before AI
None of this is entirely new.
Radio taught me years ago that audience behaviour changes by time of day. When we built schedules for advertisers, the question was never only who listened to a station. It was also what those listeners were likely to be doing when they heard the message.
Certain retail categories could perform particularly well between 9 a.m. and midday because listeners were already moving into their shopping day. Morning audiences were commuting, preparing for work, buying coffee and organising the day ahead.
Late afternoon brought another set of behaviours: the trip home, the supermarket stops, dinner decisions, family logistics.
Good radio scheduling has always understood this. But imagine taking that thinking significantly further.
More than ever, broadcasters understand when listeners commute, shop, exercise, travel, or make specific purchasing decisions. Should advertising schedules become more responsive to those behavioral patterns?
Should a coffee advertiser simply buy ‘morning drive’, or should technology identify the moments within that window when listeners are most likely to act? Should supermarket advertising run because a demographic index suggests the audience shops there, or because behavior indicates people are nearing the time of day when grocery decisions are actually made?
This is where an old medium and a new technology unexpectedly meet. Radio has always been intimate and immediate, and AI is beginning to make context computable.
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The next advertising advantage may be understanding intent in real time
Digital advertising already uses context. Google considers signals such as search terms, location, device and time. Social platforms use enormous quantities of behavioural data to determine what people may be interested in.
Those systems are sophisticated, but much of the work still involves inference. You visited three landscaping websites, so perhaps you want a new backyard. You watched several videos about Tuscany, so perhaps you are considering a trip to Italy.
You searched for mortgage rates, so perhaps you are thinking about buying a house. Conversational AI potentially changes the nature of that signal because the customer can simply say what they are trying to accomplish.
“I want to renovate my backyard before my daughter’s graduation party in May.” Now we have a project with a deadline, an occasion and perhaps a budget and a location. And, most importantly, a reason.
The advertising opportunity becomes less about finding someone who resembles a likely buyer and more about recognising when a relevant brand might genuinely be useful. That could have profound consequences for advertisers.
It may mean marketers spend less time manually constructing increasingly narrow audience segments and more time improving the offer, the creative, the customer experience and the reason someone should choose the brand in the first place. It could also mean fewer ads.
If context improves, the industry should not use that intelligence simply to find more opportunities to interrupt people but rather use it to eliminate irrelevant ones. I think that the most exciting promise of contextual advertising is that we become better at knowing when not to advertise at all.
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Context also creates uncomfortable questions
There is, of course, another side to this. The more accurately technology understands a customer’s situation, the more carefully advertisers will have to consider where the boundaries lie. There is a thin line between relevance and intrusion, and while an ad appearing at exactly the right moment can feel useful, an ad that demonstrates too much understanding of a personal conversation can feel unsettling.
And what happens when the context is misunderstood? We humans are complicated. Our conversations are often ambiguous, and our intent can change even while we are having them.
Let me explain.
A person researching an expensive illness for a relative is not necessarily looking to buy a product. Someone asking about financial difficulty should not suddenly become a target for predatory lending.
Someone discussing a difficult personal situation does not become a marketing opportunity simply because a commercial product could technically be relevant.
The ability to understand context therefore makes judgment even more important. Platforms will need strong safeguards, advertisers will need restraint, and marketers will have to think about something we do not discuss enough: not simply whether we can reach someone, but whether we should.
Interesting times
There are commercial questions too.
- Will conversational advertising ever have the scale of Google or Meta?
- Will consumers welcome ads when they are genuinely useful, or will any commercial intrusion damage the trust they place in an AI assistant?
- Will contextual advertising perform better for categories driven by immediate intent than for brands that need to create demand over extended periods of time?
We do not know yet and that is what makes this period interesting.
I left that 15-minute presentation thinking about an old advertising problem. For a long time, we have concentrated enormous amounts of technology, data and money on finding the right person, but perhaps the next frontier is the moment.
I think the best advertising has never simply been about reaching someone who could buy. It is about understanding when a message has the greatest chance of being useful, relevant and capable of moving someone to act.
And I suspect the advertising that ultimately performs best will not be the advertising that knows the most about us.
It will be the advertising that best understands what we need right now.
* Summary created by AI
Zane Derbyshire helps organisations turn complex offerings into clear stories that drive demand, support sales, and build brand trust. He’s a senior marketing and content leader with 15+ years of experience working across healthcare and media, leading multi-market strategy, building scalable content and campaign systems, and partnering closely with sales and operations teams to align marketing with real business priorities.
