Key excerpt...

Marketing and advertising, like Indian music, has always been contextual. As far back as 1867, billboards were being rented by marketers in dense urban areas outside train stations, and even earlier, direct mail took demographics into account to determine which regions and people to deliver flyers to. The truth is, though, that targeting brush strokes were broad, with flesh and bone staff doing a much better job of understanding a moment, a customer’s intent, and what the best thing to say would be. 

The game has changed over the years, in large part to the use of digital technologies and improvements in modeling groups, segments, and life stages of consumers. Context marketing represents a new pinnacle of what marketers are striving for - modeling the internal and external worlds of the customer in order to deliver meaningful, real-time experiences.