How AI Is Making Advertising More Efficient and Consumer-Focused

Last year, veteran tech journalist Walt Mossberg denounced online ads for ruining the online experience. The model is bad for everyone, as advertisers and online sites scrabble over quality control and the fight for the cheap digital real estate. Of course, the consumer has had no say other than to suffer in silence or deploy decreasingly effective adblockers. In this war, they are little more than innocent bystanders forced to wade through disingenuous attempts at engagement and bombarded with disruptive advertising that serve little purpose other than getting in the way of the content they actually want to consume. Up until this point we have consumed mass content newspapers, radio ads, TV ads, display ads knowing that we’re going to get some crap with it along the way. It’s a relationship we’ve accepted, assuming that these advertisements helped keep our content free. However, we’re becoming increasingly impatient with, and immune to, this form of disruptive display. Mossberg’s lamentation was framed by the fact that a solution to the problem was not obvious. It would require re-framing the entire model of the advertising industry and abandon core assumptions about how effective advertising works.