Future of Advertising
Artificial intelligence in advertising
The production cost of advertising material has collapsed. What has not changed is that a good brief and a real idea are still the scarce inputs.
2 min readSep 11, 2025
Section
Future of Advertising
AI, answer engines, cookieless targeting, retail media and connected TV.
Future of Advertising
Using AI images in campaigns
Cheap, fast and legally unsettled. Three rules keep the saving without acquiring a problem you cannot see yet.
2 min readSep 9, 2025
Future of Advertising
Editing AI-written copy so it holds up
The draft arrives fluent, confident and frequently wrong. A four-stage check catches what fluency conceals.
2 min readSep 7, 2025
Future of Advertising
AI video production for advertising
Usable for backgrounds, concepts and short abstract sequences. Still unreliable for anything a viewer will study, and the failure modes are specific.
2 min readSep 5, 2025
Future of Advertising
Synthetic voices and avatars
Cheap narration in forty languages, and a set of consent and likeness problems that most users have not considered.
2 min readSep 3, 2025
Future of Advertising
Disclosing AI-generated content
Rules are arriving in stages across jurisdictions. The practical question is not what is required today but what you will need to prove in two years.
2 min readSep 1, 2025
Future of Advertising
When AI agents do the buying
If a machine shortlists suppliers on a person's behalf, it reads structured data and ignores everything designed to persuade a human.
2 min readAug 30, 2025
Future of Advertising
Building visibility inside AI answers
Being cited in a generated answer is the new first position, and the factors that produce it only partly overlap with search ranking.
2 min readAug 28, 2025
Future of Advertising
Answer engines are replacing search boxes
The list of ten blue links is becoming one paragraph with three citations. That changes what advertising has to do at every stage.
2 min readAug 26, 2025
Future of Advertising
Machine-readable sites: llms.txt and structure
A small file, a crawler policy and clean markup. Half a day of work that determines whether machine intermediaries can use your site at all.
2 min readAug 24, 2025
Future of Advertising
Writing content that gets cited
A passage gets quoted when it says something specific that can be checked. Almost all business writing fails on both counts.
2 min readAug 22, 2025
Future of Advertising
Structured data as an advertising tool
Markup that tells machines exactly what a page contains. It changes how you appear in results and how intermediaries describe you.
2 min readAug 20, 2025
Future of Advertising
Zero-click search: what advertising still delivers
A majority of searches now end without a click. That is not the end of search marketing, but it does end one way of measuring it.
2 min readAug 18, 2025
Future of Advertising
Advertising without third-party cookies
The cross-site identifier has been degrading for years. What replaces it is not one thing but four, and each suits a different job.
2 min readAug 16, 2025
Future of Advertising
Building first-party data you own
The only customer data unaffected by browser policy, platform changes and intermediary shifts. It takes years to build and it is the asset that survives everything.
2 min readAug 14, 2025
Future of Advertising
The comeback of contextual targeting
Placing advertising by what the page is about rather than who is reading it. The oldest method in the medium, and currently the most sensible for most display budgets.
2 min readAug 12, 2025
Future of Advertising
Consent banners that do not hurt performance
A lawful banner and a high consent rate are not opposites. Design decides both, and most banners get both wrong at once.
2 min readAug 10, 2025
Future of Advertising
Data clean rooms, explained
A controlled environment where two parties analyse combined data without either seeing the other's records. Useful at scale, overkill below it.
2 min readAug 8, 2025
Future of Advertising
Retail media: the new power in retail
Retailers discovered they own the most valuable advertising inventory there is: the moment of purchase. Brands are now paying for shelf position twice.
2 min readAug 6, 2025
Future of Advertising
Connected TV instead of classic spots
Television-quality attention with digital targeting and digital-looking metrics. Two of those three are as good as they sound.
2 min readAug 4, 2025
Future of Advertising
Audio ads and smart speakers
Streaming audio reaches people during activities where no screen is available. That is its whole advantage and it dictates the creative.
2 min readAug 2, 2025
Future of Advertising
Advertising in games and esports
An audience larger than any single television channel, and an environment where the wrong approach is punished immediately and publicly.
2 min readJul 31, 2025
Future of Advertising
Augmented reality in advertising
A technology with one genuinely proven application and a long list of expensive novelties. Knowing which is which saves a great deal of money.
2 min readJul 29, 2025
Future of Advertising
Sustainable advertising and its carbon cost
Digital advertising has a measurable emissions footprint, most of it from the supply chain rather than the media. Reducing it also reduces waste.
2 min readJul 27, 2025