In Context: Scaling contextual targeting in CTV through strategic partnerships

As streaming TV continues to grow, contextual targeting is becoming a key strategy for advertisers looking to improve performance. But unlike traditional digital environments, CTV presents challenges around fragmented supply and inconsistent metadata – making scale harder to achieve.

In a recent conversation with Zach Rosenstock, Director, Inventory Development at StackAdapt, we explored how their team is navigating these challenges. Their approach reflects the current reality of CTV: to scale contextual targeting, collaboration across SSPs, publishers, and data partners is necessary to fill gaps in metadata and ensure buyers can activate with confidence.

While proprietary taxonomies are currently enabling scale and consistency, Rosenstock explains, there is growing recognition that broader standardization is needed for contextual targeting to reach its full potential. As the ecosystem evolves, combining scalable infrastructure with richer, more standardized metadata will be critical to unlocking more precise, performance-driven CTV advertising.

We’ve really found that by fostering strong partnerships across the supply space, we’ve been able to bridge any metadata-related gap that we’ve had to come up across via those partnerships and provide our buyers with what they need.”

Zach Rosenstock

Director, Inventory Development
StackAdapt

In Context is a Wurl original video series featuring short-form conversations with industry leaders exploring the impact of contextual targeting in CTV. Each episode dives into how emerging technologies are helping advertisers unlock smarter creative strategies, improve performance, and drive better outcomes on the biggest screen in the home.

Transcript:

Tori:  Well, Zach, thank you so much for being here with us today.

Zach:  Yes, very happy to be here.

Tori: Awesome. I got to start with the question, StackAdapt has long provided contextual targeting across digital channels. Curious to hear how are you adapting that approach for the streaming environment specifically, especially as we know the streaming environment, metadata and context are often harder to come by.

Zach:  Yeah, so I think the long-term hope, and I know that there are things like VPPA (Video Privacy Protection Act) to navigate where we can’t really control a lot of that on our end, but for now, we’re very happy working directly with our strategic partners in order to manage contextual targeting, be it working with various SSPs for them to create contextual packages for us across CTV, various publishers, various providers that can do some really, really unique things.

We’ve really found that by fostering strong partnerships across the supply space, we’ve been able to bridge any metadata-related gap that we’ve had to come up across via those partnerships and provide our buyers with what they need.

Tori: And I’m curious, as you work with so many different partners, do you see room for greater standardization and contextual metadata across those DSPs and SSPs, or in your opinion, is the market trending more so toward proprietary taxonomies and private marketplaces?

Zach:  So I think right now, we’re trending towards the proprietary taxonomies as a means of accelerating our ability and the scale available to us as it relates to receiving those content objects and that metadata consistently and reliably.

Ultimately, if we’re going to see the kind of scale we need as the buy side to decision off of these things, if the publishers are going to feel comfortable in unison to stop worrying about some of the cherry-picking concerns and embrace supporting content objects as a real means of yield and how they think about monetizing their inventory as a whole, we do need to see just broader industry-level standardization that I imagine will eventually be led by the IAB.

Tori:  Let’s talk workflow. What does it actually look like today for a buyer to activate a contextually targeted CTV campaign with StackAdapt?

Zach: Yeah, so when a buyer sets up a CTV campaign, by default, they’re kind of taken to the marketplace that I described previously, where everything is channel-based. But if their desire is to really focus on contextual targeting, we have an inventory package marketplace, which would be a deals library for them to navigate, search, and really find what it is from a contextual targeting standpoint that they’re looking to tap into.

But that would really be the means that a buyer would use, or at least the most turnkey means. And then beyond that, we can facilitate some kind of custom activation like a custom PMP. 

Tori:  Awesome. Thank you so much, Zach. Appreciate you being here. 

Zach: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for having me.