There are no primary exchanges for targeting content. You can't 'put your ad near an article for beer' at any real scale. In the old days, if you were paying

There are no primary exchanges for targeting content. You can't 'put your ad near an article for beer' at any real scale. In the old days, if you were paying $$$ for a spot in a magazine, you might be able to control where your ad was going to be placed, and certainly today, if you want to do that, you can find ways. Certainly you could buy ads on a 'beer blog'. But by and large, this doesn't exist at any meaningful scale where you can just go out and buy 'a bunch of ad spots in articles about beer'. Second - it's something, but still arguably not more effective than individual targeting. Most products and service have baseline demo. targets and that's quite important. If you're L'OREAL you really don't want to be hustling your new eyeliner to middle aged men, that's pretty much a 'first order concern'. Targeting does mostly work, we should not be in denial about that.