CANNES – As brands pour more money into digital advertising, the industry is facing a transparency crisis. Jonah Goodhart believes it’s time to fix it. The co-founder and chief executive of Mobian said true “contextual” advertising has been misunderstood.
“As an industry, we’ve talked about contextual for years. I would argue it’s really been keywords, not contextual,” Goodhart said in this interview with Beet.TV contributor David Kaplan at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. “We want to understand the actual essence of content — the nuanced themes, genres, emotions, sentiment, attention — all of those things are part of what we think of as contextual intelligence.”
Mobian, an ad-tech firm focused on contextual intelligence, has become a foundational partner in the Alli Marketplace that digital agency PMG unveiled at Cannes Lions. Providing brands with detailed insights into where and how their ads run is Mobian’s key goal. The company leverages generative AI to analyze content beyond surface-level keywords, summarizing articles, videos and audio to determine if the environment aligns with a brand’s message and values.
Goodhart, a longtime ad-tech entrepreneur known for founding Moat, framed advertising as storytelling — and argued that understanding emotion, context and attention is essential for meaningful engagement.
“If we’re in the business of telling stories, we need to understand where we’re reaching people, how we’re reaching people, and what emotion we’re reaching people with,” he said. “There is a gigantic opportunity, a gigantic unlock that is coming, if we seize the moment.”
Advanced Metrics Are Critical for Ad-Supported Premium Content: Mobian’s Jonah Goodhart
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