Kartal Goksel is helping advertisers move beyond identity-based targeting and toward a more privacy-first, context-aware future. As Chief Technology Officer at Seedtag, he leads technology for a company focused on contextual advertising, using AI to understand what content means, how it feels, and what intent it signals without relying on personal identity or invasive tracking.

In this episode, Russ and Kartal explore how digital advertising is changing as third-party cookies, privacy expectations, AI tools, and consumer behavior reshape the industry. Kartal explains why contextual advertising can reduce the cognitive friction consumers feel when ads follow them around the internet, and why aligning ads with the content someone is consuming can create a better experience for users, publishers, and brands.

They dive into Seedtag’s AI engine, Liz, and how it analyzes content across text, images, video, metadata, language, emotion, interest, and intent. Kartal explains how neuro-contextual advertising goes beyond keywords to understand the full meaning of content and match campaigns to the right moment.

The conversation also covers why privacy-first architecture changes how advertising systems are built. Instead of focusing on who the user is, Seedtag focuses on the content itself and the interaction between that content and the person consuming it.

Along the way, Kartal discusses the engineering challenges behind real-time ad decisioning, the scale of programmatic advertising, agentic workflows, campaign planning, publisher trust, consumer privacy, and why the future of media buying may involve AI agents working together to plan, activate, and optimize campaigns faster.

Topics Covered:

[00:01] Welcome and intro, Kartal Goksel and Seedtag’s AI Excellence Award win

[00:38] Seedtag’s background in contextual and in-image advertising

[01:51] How AI is changing both the consumer and publisher sides of advertising

[02:55] Contextual advertising versus identity-based advertising

[04:38] Why retargeted ads create cognitive friction

[05:33] How contextual advertising helps publishers keep users engaged

[06:55] Introducing Liz, Seedtag’s AI engine

[07:24] Detecting interest, emotion, and intent from content

[08:51] Third-party cookies and the shift toward privacy-first advertising

[10:08] Why younger users are more privacy conscious

[11:19] Why current content can be more valuable than old behavioral history

[11:50] How marketers can evaluate contextual advertising performance

[13:59] Building privacy-first advertising architecture

[15:23] Why context is more than keyword matching

[15:48] Moving from keywords to embeddings and full content understanding

[18:33] Working with neuroscience to validate neuro-contextual advertising

[20:08] Analyzing text, images, video, metadata, and language at scale

[20:48] Engineering challenges in real-time ad decisioning

[22:46] Scaling models, latency, caching, and cloud costs

[23:43] Why milliseconds matter in digital advertising

[25:40] Liz Agent and moving from planning to activation

[26:01] Agentic workflows for building custom audiences

[27:37] Airline campaign results and product recognition lift

[30:25] Can contextual advertising rebuild consumer trust?

[32:04] Neuro-contextual advertising as a campaign planning layer

[33:31] Reducing human dependency in digital advertising workflows

[34:47] How context can reduce targeting mistakes and wasted spend

[36:24] What brand marketers and media buyers should discuss with agencies

[37:50] Final thoughts on stopping irrelevant ads from following users around the internet