114: The Onus is On Us to Listen with Brendan Norman

What if the future of advertising isn’t about who you are, but what you’re thinking about right now?

Brendan Norman has always been drawn to systems: how they work, where they break, and what others overlook. From being the first salesperson at Facebook Audience Network (where he helped scale the business to $3 billion) to leading Unity’s ad business through its IPO, Brendan’s career has been about asking better questions.

Now, he’s tackling a different kind of challenge: building Classify, a privacy-first ad tech platform that doesn’t rely on personal data. Instead, it uses AI to understand the meaning behind content—and matches ads accordingly.

In this episode of the Marketing Umbrella Podcast, Brendan explains how Classify emerged from his own frustration with traditional ad targeting. While trying to promote a niche ski guide service, he realized that existing tools couldn’t deliver ads with enough context. So he built something better.

He also draws a surprising parallel between startup life and his namesake, St. Brendan, both navigating uncharted territory with curiosity and a strong sense of direction.

Here are the key takeaways from the conversation:

• Context Beats Identity. Classify organizes content at scale, making it searchable and monetizable without relying on personal data.
• Simplicity Wins. Customer feedback shaped the product into something anyone can use. No jargon, no fluff.
• Fragmentation Is the Enemy. The ad tech ecosystem is bloated and inefficient. The future is in simplification and transparency.
• Vision Matters. Classify and organize content into an accurate “library of the world” in a privacy-safe way.
• AI Opens New Possibilities. With embeddings, vector databases, and scalable classification, advertisers can finally target in ways that align with human understanding of content.

 

Closing thought: “Our vision is to organize content and make it searchable and monetizable in a privacy-safe way. We want to be the accurate library of the world’s content.”

 

Listen to the full conversation here:

• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@frintmedia
• Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-marketing-umbrella-podcast/id1564111428
• Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4CoiR10nazd9zVIStLkcjk

 

Connect with Brendan:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brendannorman/ 
• Classify LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/classifyinc/ 
• Website: https://www.tryclassify.com/ 

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To learn more about Umbrella and to connect with CEO Itamar Shafir, go to ⁠https://umbrellaus.com