Fiona Salmon, Managing Director of Mantis, on real-time intent data, why brand safety belongs at source, the only two parties who really need to be in the ad ecosystem, and why a sustainable model is an efficient one.
"Past behaviours is what we used to track. Now it is real-time intent."
Twenty-six years across publishing, media sales, audience data and ad tech. Fiona Salmon on why programmatic delivered scale at the cost of transparency, why contextual targeting has come back as a privacy-first answer, why brand safety only really works when content is filtered at source, and why a sustainable advertising ecosystem and an efficient one are the same thing.
Fiona Salmon’s career began in 1999 at Trinity Mirror Group selling sponsored editorial pullouts to ad agencies, then six years at Emap on the Mens magazine portfolio (FHM, Arena, Zoo), a year at News International on thesun.co.uk, and nine years at Vibrant Media in commercial and business development leadership. Two and a half years as Managing Director UK at the predictive data platform 1plusX through the cookieless transition followed, then almost four years at Captify, rising to Global VP of Partnerships and Sustainability Lead. In June 2024 she became Managing Director of Mantis, the contextual and brand safety platform launched inside Reach plc in 2019.
In this conversation with host John Horsley, Fiona argues that the post-cookie change is fundamentally about moving from past behaviours to real-time intent: where is a user right now, what are they reading, what cultural moment are they in. She makes the case for block-at-source brand safety (rather than downstream filtering), for getting closer to publishers, for using AI sparingly because of its real environmental cost, and for the unfashionable view that complexity has rarely improved performance. The only two people who really need to be in the ecosystem are brands and publishers.
"The biggest shift was from print to digital. Then by far the second was the dawn of programmatic. Massive."
Fiona lived both transitions on the supply side, at Emap through the Mens magazine portfolio (FHM, Arena, Zoo) and at Vibrant Media through the rise of programmatic in-content advertising. Programmatic was built for scale, and her teams welcomed it because the one-to-one rate negotiation across dozens of supply partners was eating commercial time. But scale came with non-transparent trading and a long tail of intermediaries each taking a cut. The third era, the one we are in now, is transparency.
"Past behaviours is what we used to track. Now it is real-time intent data. Where are people right now? What are they reading?"
Privacy and GDPR ended the era of behavioural stalking across the web. Third-party data is being used less because brands and the supply side have understood the value of first-party data. Mantis’ contextual technology can now tell a brand not just where a user is, but where they came from and where they are going. Targeting can ride a cultural moment rather than chase a stale identifier.
"Unsafe and unsuitable content should never make it into the mainstream. Then an ad cannot appear next to it. Or fund it."
Most brand safety tooling sits at the ad-serving layer. Mantis sits upstream. It scans the article (and now video, with a new audio-visual product in beta) at source, then decides whether the content is suitable for advertising. Publishers do this already with editorial codes. Platforms could and should. The Molly Russell case is the ethical version of the same point: content should be blocked before a child sees it, and certainly before an ad funds it.
"Over sixty per cent of news articles in a normal week carry positive sentiment. Brands are missing the audience by overblocking the category."
News is the area Fiona thinks the industry still gets most wrong. Block lists are blunt. Mantis can target news with positive sentiment for brands that want to be there, and (for the right brand and message) negative sentiment too. The Bitcoin Bank example: positive articles get one creative, negative articles get a different one, dynamic creative optimisation in real time, both performing. Brands miss an attention-driven, highly engaged audience when they exclude journalism wholesale.
"Fewer hops between buy and sell. Less data transferred. Less AI used badly. That is what sustainable looks like."
Programmatic advertising is hidden in a way aviation never was: the carbon cost of data transfer and AI compute lives in someone else’s data centre, called farms in industry copy, and goes unmeasured. Fiona’s sustainability argument is also a commercial one. Every hop in the chain costs margin and energy. Cutting hops is the same lever for both. Just because we can does not mean we should is the rule of thumb she keeps coming back to.
"Just because we can does not mean we should."
Host What first drew you into media and advertising?
Salmon Honestly mercenary. I was flat sharing in London, I was in PR, and I noticed all my flatmates were happier, working fewer hours and getting paid more. They were in media sales. I asked them to get me a job. It is literally as basic as that.
Host The biggest shifts you have lived through.
Salmon Print to digital, first. I was at Emap, now Bauer, on really young youth brands that moved quickly because the audience was moving. Then by far the dawn of programmatic. Massive. The third shift, the one we are in now, is transparency. Programmatic gave buyers scale, but it brought non-transparent trading with it.
Host Why is this moment in time important for Mantis?
Salmon If you are a technology partner now you have to walk the walk: be transparent about what you technically do and do not do, and where you are curated. Privacy and GDPR have changed the game too. People like my parents now understand a bit about cookies. My dad denies every cookie. I accept every cookie because I want a better experience. There is a real privacy-first audience now.
Host Why is the cookie-based model under pressure?
Salmon Past behaviours is what we used to track. Now it is real-time intent data. Where are people right now? What are they reading? What are they interested in?
Host Has the industry become too dependent on third-party data and complexity?
Salmon It did, because we allowed it. Brands now understand the importance of first-party data. The supply side understands it too. Third-party is being used less, and that is a good thing. Complexity does not always equal performance. More hops, more takers.
Host Are we moving to a healthier model?
Salmon Definitely healthier. There will be fallout. Made-for-advertising content is being eked out. It should never have been allowed in in the first place. Good technology can now surface it. Healthier is happening.
Host Why is contextual back?
Salmon Cookieless browsers. Real-time intent. And the current brand-safety tech does not do enough of a good job. Contextual can now tell a brand not just where someone is, but where they came from and where they went to. The devil is in the detail now.
Host The performance KPIs.
Salmon Still heavily bound to CTR. But outcomes-based KPIs are where we are heading. That is the holy grail.
Host Brand safety and excluding journalism.
Salmon News is still getting overblocked. There is great research by Stagwell that proves it out. Over sixty per cent of news articles in a normal week carry positive sentiment. Brands miss an attention-driven, highly engaged audience by avoiding the category wholesale. Mantis can target news with positive sentiment, or, for the right brand, negative.
Host Smarter brand safety.
Salmon Adopt technology that assesses risk at source. Unsafe and unsuitable content should never make it into the mainstream in the first place. Then the ad cannot appear next to it. Publishers do this with editorial codes. Platforms do not. Molly versus the machines is the case. That content should be blocked at source. An ad should not be funding it.
Host What do Meta and Google need to do?
Salmon If we can build Mantis, they can build their own. They have more engineers than we do. And if they want technology that works, they can give us a shout.
Host AI changing what is possible.
Salmon Scale. We can target many articles and videos with high contextual precision because AI lets us classify at scale. You cannot have humans watch every video. Designed well, AI is transparent. Designed badly, it brings opacity. We do not want opacity at scale because trust collapses.
Host Where is AI getting ahead of itself?
Salmon Publisher content being stolen at scale and not remunerated is terrifying. I cannot believe regulation has not stepped in. What OpenAI and others are doing right now will hit publishing hard, and I dread to think where they are in three to six months.
Host Mantis being built by a publisher.
Salmon We were with an agency recently who said what they love is that Mantis is the best contextual performer on plan, out of eleven vendors, and that working with Mantis means supporting the supply side. That agency had a direction to spend less with ad-tech vendors. I never would have heard that before. Mantis is not another tag in the chain. It is on the supply side, scanning content at source.
Host Has publishing been undervalued in today's ecosystem?
Salmon A hundred per cent. It depends what content they are bringing, but the difficult decisions always land in publishing. Friends are being made redundant right now. Ad ops and rev ops teams are shrinking. Subscriptions, getting closer to brands, and understanding young audiences are how publishers rebuild.
Host Contextual versus audience intelligence.
Salmon Audience targeting is most effective on first-party data, which keeps it small and granular. Contextual brings scale. Both together is the way forward.
Host What are the smartest brands doing differently?
Salmon Collecting first-party and zero-party data. Then using contextual to find their audience in cultural moments rather than stalking past behaviour. OMG’s segment targeting work is bespoke and very smart. Barclays is one that comes to mind.
Host Sustainability.
Salmon We are a massive hidden industry. Aviation you can see, smell and touch. Programmatic is all in the cloud, called farms, very lovely sounding. We cannot see the data transfer carbon. Do not get me started on AI. A sustainable ecosystem is an efficient one. Fewer hops, less data, AI sparingly. That is the same lever as the commercial case.
Host One ad-tech trend that is overhyped.
Salmon Block list technology.
Host One thing the industry still gets wrong about publishers.
Salmon All news content.
Host A single capability every media leader needs now.
Salmon You have got to move with the times.
Host What has the industry not yet realised about what a better ecosystem could look like?
Salmon Efficiency.
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