It appears that the future of advertising now hinges on the faulty conclusion that if only 0.01% of ad exposures produce the desired outcome, then we must scale advertising using A.I. so that people are exposed to 10 000 ads for each successful outcome.

Obviously, this relies entirely on a calculation of efficiency as opposed to effectiveness. We seem to have given up on making ads more effective, and instead accept the fact that ads are now so ineffective, the only way to counteract it is by spamming people, at scale.

Does noone in advertising ever stop to think that this is really nothing but a race to the bottom, and will only serve to make advertising progressively less and less effective? Forcing advertisers to spam people more and more? Cluttering up more and more channels and spaces with less and less productive ads? Email as a channel has already been severely compromised due to spam. Social media is quickly going the same way, with users constantly complaining that their feed is taken up by more and more ads and promoted posts with tenuous relevance to them.

Advertising needs to be relevant and authentic for people to give it any of their time. Our bullshit detectors have gotten so refined that we now tune out ads without even thinking about it. When people feel like they are being manipulated into constantly looking at ads instead of whatever they’d rather be looking at, we’re left with ad fatigue, and people turning their eyes away.

We need LESS advertising for advertising to be effective, not MORE of it, and we also need the ads to be more tailored and curated.

A.I. is not the way out of this. Authenticity and relevance to human beings will never be produced by a machine. The machine might be able to judge the likelihood of such relevance, but in order for the machine to replicate that relevance, it by definition has to serve a copious amount of irrelevant ads in order to learn. More ads will never make people more receptive to advertising. It will only leave people feeling starved of meaning and context, which will turn them more and more apathetic.

Advertising at scale, then, is a recipe for apathy.