As sensing technologies advance, designers face an increasing variety of exploitable context when they create intel- ligent context-adaptive systems. In this opaque conglomerate of context, designers of intelligent systems find it difficult to select the elements that most effectively help a system tap into its full potential of intelligence. In emerging technology-driven areas, there is a vital need for a universally valid, flexible structure that provides the basis for target-oriented research using a shared conceptualization. In fact, such a framework is essential to enable, yield, and foster sustainability in a novel and inter- disciplinary research field. For this reason, this paper introduces a cohesive and flexible conceptual framework for conceptual- izing context for intelligent systems (CCFIS). Based on an example of the pervasive advertising domain, this paper shows how designers can conceptualize context in adherence to CCFIS.