What you need to know

• Captify and ITV are using closed captions plus semantic AI to contextually target ads in Connected TV (CTV)—matching ads to what’s actually said on screen, not who’s watching.
• With Australia’s privacy laws tightening, the model offers a cookie-free, ID-free solution that aligns with future compliance standards and consumer sentiment.
• ITV uses Captify to dynamically read TV dialogue, such as “weekend winery getaway”, to serve contextually relevant, premium-priced ads in real time.
• Captify has also decoupled its media from its measurement tools, allowing TV networks to access its intent analytics regardless of who sold the media.
• The firm is pushing a privacy-first model based on intent signals, not identity—analysing search data from over 3 million websites across verticals.
• As cookie deprecation and signal loss loom, Captify believes it can offer a blueprint for Australian broadcasters to remain relevant, compliant and competitive in the CTV era.

Search intelligence firm Captify wants to create contextual gold for Connected TV. Using semantic AI to read the thematic cues in TV dialogue—think “weekend winery getaway” or “renovation chaos”— it's serving up ads that align with the actual content on screen, in real time. It’s context, rebooted. And with Australia’s privacy laws tightening and cookies heading for the shredder, it might just be the blueprint for how local broadcasters claw back control, relevance and revenue in the next wave of CTV.

Captify is part of a new wave of privacy-compliant, intent-rich TV targeting reshaping the CTV ad market, from postcode-level precision with GroupM to ITV’s use of semantic AI on closed captions. For Captify CEO Mike Welch, it's a sign his firm can script a new chapter for addressable television.

Context is king again

ITV leans on the contextual play, says Welch. “We use our semantic learning models, apply it to their closed captioning data, and we can tell them in any given episode what the sort of theme of an episode may be,” he tells Mi3. 

“Let’s take Desperate Housewives: That show could be about anything in a particular episode. If from the closed captioning, we find out they’re going to take a trip to a winery… then we let ITV know that, and they can sell contextually relevant ads about trips, wine or what have you.”

It’s context, rebooted. And with Australia’s privacy reform on a slow but steady march toward European-style constraints – assuming they survive the Trump administration’s bully-for-hire intercession on behalf of the global tech giants - that could be a big clue for broadcasters searching for alternatives to identity-fuelled targeting. According to Welch, Captify's solution is free of personal identifiers, placing it firmly on the right side of Australia’s coming privacy firewall.

Captify’s partnership with ITV is one of two CTV approaches it's executing in the UK market. One is contextual, the other addressable. 

While AI has long been touted as a tool for content moderation or automation, this is AI as a revenue enabler—transforming TV dialogue into data-rich targeting opportunities, says Welch. “You can sell contextually relevant ads and you can command a higher CPM for doing it," he adds.

Addressability, rebooted

If ITV is playing the content context card, GroupM for Advanced TV (previously Nexus) is going straight for postcode-level precision. In the UK, the media giant is using Captify’s search-intent data to fuel postcode-based targeting across connected TV environments—some of which reach as granular as 10 households.

Welch offered a US example.

"In the US, there's a sales channel for addressable TV advertising called Ampersand. They represent three of the big distributors of cable television there: Comcast, Cox and Charter... Ampersand is using our data for targeting and measurement. We're not the media channel in this case. They targeted Honda auto intenders and used our data to find out who these auto intenders were. There was a 60% lift in search behaviour after receiving the household addressable TV ad. So in the US, you could deliver a specific ad to a specific house addressable, whereas in the UK it's more of a zip code level."

Coincidentally, Captify also saw a 60 per cent lift in purchase intent. "That was versus just searching for a Honda as a brand, [instead, it was 'build my own Honda', or 'dealer near me', or 'next sale day' that type of thing]," he explains. 

According to Welch, Australian broadcasters may not yet have the infrastructure for house-level targeting, but postcode-level targeting is well within reach.

Decoupling media from measurement

One of Captify’s most significant strategic moves in the past year? Breaking up with its own media.

“Up until about a year ago, we only provided that type of measurement data if you bought the media through us,” Welch said. “But we now can do it on a standalone basis. We’ve decoupled the data, as we like to call it… so it doesn’t matter who sold the media… as long as they gave us the as-run logs… we can then do that A/B testing to show whether the media was effective.”

That pivot means Australian media companies—think Nine, Seven, or SBS—can now plug into Captify’s search-intent analytics even if the media buy went through another partner. In a market obsessed with transparency and unbundling, that may prove to be a smart tactical step.

“Everything is about unbundled transparency here,” notes a local Captify spokesperson who said clients want to see what’s working, and want the ability to activate or measure independently.

Cookie-light, signal-rich

Given its contextual slant, Captify positions its model as privacy compliance by design. Rather than using personal identifiers or third-party cookies, it leans on contextual and behavioural patterns, such as search data from over 3 million publisher websites, analysed across verticals from travel to automotive to pharma.

“Our business is contextual-based. We’re not one-to-one ID-based… we’re not collecting PII. It’s all… based on what people are searching for,” says Welch. “Say people searching for travel: We will find the URLs that travel intenders most frequently visit, and it's those URLs that comprise our Deal ID. That's what you're buying - a bundle of URLs. From a privacy standpoint, it puts us in a much better position.”

The company is also exploring cookie-proof ID solutions via partnerships with players like ID5 and Experian. Welch says Captify will "link to their identifier so we can have a cookie-proof, identity-based product. We've got that now in the UK, and we've got it now in the US. We have capabilities rolled out, but we can continue to get better and refine them and then will bring that to Australia."

Intent not identity

But the foundation of Captify's proposition is that intent, not identity, is the future of media because it's more accurate. "You might lie on a survey or in a focus group… but you’re typically not going to lie to your search bar," comments Welch.

For Australia’s broadcasters, Welch believes the implications are stark. A shift is coming. As data laws tighten and signal loss accelerates, the option to wait and see is no longer viable. Captify’s success with ITV and GroupM in the UK provides a playbook, he suggests: Lean into context, extract intent from language, and target based on what people are watching or reading, not who they are.

That's a message that might resonate loudly in boardrooms juggling regulatory risk, tech platform dependency, and the endless pressure to prove media effectiveness.