I've been watching this same pattern play out for years. Tech is devouring advertising the same way low-effort AI content is hollowing out social media. It's the dead internet hypothesis made real-not through conspiracy, but through cold financial logic. Programmatic ad buying rewards automated noise, so that's what we get. The fact that right-wing billionaires are buying up platforms has more to do with their wealth than ideology, the ideology just accelerates the decay.
Having been around since the early days of figuring out how to monetise web content, I see this as the natural endpoint once processing power and bandwidth become cheap enough that bots and fake engagement cost less than real human creativity.
To me, the only genuine countermove is authenticity. White-glove placements on real, human-crafted content-out-of-home, live events, physical activations. That either comes with a premium price tag or stays hyperlocal. Everything else is just fighting to stay afloat in a rising tide of grey sludge.
Influencer marketing can cut through, but only if it avoids the outrage bait or soft-porn bikini-cam stuff, because AI will churn out that garbage faster and cheaper.
My gut tells me ad tech and AI are artificially propped up by tax breaks and cheap power for data centres, plus inflated stock valuations. If you stripped away those subsidies, real humans doing this work would actually come out cheaper.
