Contextual targeting
In practice, for a UK buyer
The paragraph above is the neutral answer. This is the part a vendor glossary leaves out.
Structurally privacy-safe and increasingly the honest default as behavioural identifiers decline. It is what AdBuyMCP's audio compilation actually is: show and genre allowlists proxying the audience, graded content-level at 65 rather than dressed up as person-level. The same logic makes cinema and DOOH sit outside UK GDPR scope for delivery — a venue catchment is a property of a place, not of a person.
What this one connects to
Most confusion in media buying comes from two adjacent terms being used interchangeably, so these are the neighbours worth reading next.
Audience segment
A named group of people a seller will let you target, defined by some combination of demographics, behaviour, stated interest or inferred intent, and identified in a buying system by a specific identifier.
Fidelity score
A published score out of 100 answering one question: how much of an audience definition survives translation into a channel's native targeting words. It is a property of that translation rather than a forecast, and it is not a quality rating.
Digital audio advertising
Audio advertising delivered through streaming music, digital radio and podcasts, bought by show, genre, publisher segment and daypart. Distinct from broadcast radio in that individual impressions are counted and targeting is applied per listener session.
More on targeting and identity
How an audience is described to a seller, and how much of the description survives. Most of the honest difficulty in media buying lives here.
45 minutes. Bring a real brief and we compile it live. You describe one audience and watch it compile into seven targeting specifications, each with the score for how much of the definition survived.
Talk it through