In marketing, audiences have long been at the center of decision-making. Brands spend a great deal of time and effort building Customer Data Platforms (CDPs), design personalization engines, and create sophisticated segmentation strategies. The goal: to know who their customers are and deliver messages that will resonate.
I’ve worked alongside some of the world’s largest brands to develop these audience strategies — from technical foundations that enable scalable audience development to organizational structures that embed audiences into the heart of brand strategy. Marketers have an abundance of data points and targeting attributes at their fingertips. It is not a far reach to say, “If you can imagine it, we can target it.” Hundreds of thousands of targeting parameters are now available across systems and platforms. But there’s a ceiling to what pure audience targeting can achieve — and that ceiling is context.
Beyond Segments: The Case for Context
Audience data can tell you who someone is, but not what they are experiencing in the moment. Even the most precisely defined audience segment can fail to produce the desired effect if it doesn’t account for real-world, real-time conditions. For instance, a media spot aimed at “career-focused moms” may reach the intended demographic, but it will fail if it appears during a chaotic bedtime routine. Right audience, wrong context, wrong outcome.
Now, consider the parallel in the world of AI and agentic systems.
Large Language Models (LLMs) for marketing leaders is a lot like audience data: rich, extensive, and capable of incredible feats when harnessed correctly. Yet without the right context, even the most sophisticated AI models stumble. They miss nuance and repeat outputs. It’s only when the user provides contextual layers, knowledge, and examples that the outputs and workflows truly shine.
Context transforms AI in the same way that data transforms marketing to audiences. It is the difference between an agent that simply answers questions and one that understands the broader situation and intent behind those questions. Context elevates AI from transactional to transformational. Context helps AI shift from responding to prompts to assisting with tasks.
Why Context Is the New Competitive Advantage
Just as in marketing we move from audiences to moments and mindsets, in AI we must move from pure data ingestion to contextual intelligence — building systems that not only process information but do so with a real understanding of the user’s environment, needs, and goals.
- In marketing, brands that can transcend audience segments and understand mindsets, moments, and environments will outperform those that stay stuck on surface-level targeting.
- In AI development, companies that build context-aware agents — systems that can interpret not just the query but the broader intent and situation — will lead the next generation of user experiences.
It’s no longer enough to design campaigns and audience strategies on targeting data alone. We need dynamic, adaptive systems that respond to the real, shifting realities of consumers.
Building for a Context-Driven Future
I recently joined Transparent Partners, a company rich with context. The team is made up of so many talented people with the industry’s deepest expertise across marketing technology, data strategy, and adtech consulting. This expertise combined with AI will help our client better navigate the complexity of digital marketing, architect audience strategies, optimizing media and construct data ecosystems better, faster, and more transparent than ever. This is only possible because of the context behind what we are building. The expertise, the experience, and intimate knowledge of the challenges worth solving.
Final Thought
Any brand that has the money and is willing to spend it can have access to any data they want. In marketing where differentiation is paramount, the new differentiator isn’t what you have — it’s how well you understand and activate context.
If you want to build marketing strategies and AI agents that are truly effective, start by focusing less on the audiences you can buy and more on the context you can understand.
Because, whether in marketing or AI, the brands, teams, and the machines that understand context best will be the ones that win.
Chris Marshall, EVP of AI Media Solutions
