Not solving advertising

Ari Paparo writes, in When Will Advertising Be Solved?,

Like many hypotheses to be tested, we might differentiate the strong form of the solving advertising argument from the weak form.

The strong form is something like this:

AI will enable any advertiser to set a budget and then optimally purchase advertising to produce the maximum return on ad spend.

But that’s not solving advertising.

“Any advertiser” can include a North Korean malware operation, and too often does.

Advertising can really only work for the buyer as well as for the seller if it’s based on some action that’s obviously—to the audience—harder for a legitimate advertiser than for a deceptive advertiser.

The “any advertiser” version is turning a once-useful advertising industry into just a subset of “security risks to block on the Internet.” And the problem is deeper than whether or not to include afterthought “anti-fraud” on top of an ad system where the core rules are designed to advantage fraud. Solving advertising has to have a market design that puts deception at a disadvantage. This is harder than it looks, but still doable. Print media pulled it off when they were breathing the fumes from molten lead all day.

The strong form of solving advertising—with AI in the picture or not—has to be considered from the audience point of view, too. Advertising works when

content + signal ≥ interruption + resources + risk

Advertising can provide two benefits to the audience: it can support some kind of resource (which technically doesn’t have to be “content,” bus bench ads are a thing, too) and it can send a credible signal of the advertiser’s intentions in the market.

And advertising asks the audience to pay, with some kind of interruption—otherwise it would be not advertising, but content marketing—and spend some kind of resources, such as battery and bandwidth, and often accept some kind of risk.

But read what the mainstream IT media and organizations have to say about online advertising, and it’s pretty obvious that with today’s online ads, the balance doesn’t work out. Blocking the ads is safer.

Krystal Scanlon and Sam Bradley write, in, Google search loses its free pass with buyers,

Across conversations with 18 media buyers, Digiday found clients putting Google through the kind of scrutiny usually saved for newer channels.

Google’s spin on the situation is that they just need to “AI” harder, but something else is going on. The Google search ads have signal trending down, while risk trends up. The FBI warning not to click on the search ads is still up, the best-informed users are blocking the Google search ads entirely, and everyone is learning that Google is less and less trustworthy.

Blaming insufficient AI for Google’s disappointing earnings will turn out to be a mistake.

An industry that can “solve advertising” for all advertisers is an industry on track to be blocked, regulated, and sued.

Anyway, I’m supposed to run my mouth about the rugpull economy at Texas Linux Fest in Austin on Saturday, so I hope to see you there: Texas Linux Fest 2026