A new world of advertising

You pick up your phone mindlessly, open a few apps out of habit, realize you can’t remember why you picked up your phone in the first place, lock it, look up, and realize you just missed a key play or scene.

The new multitasker

There’s a term for this experience – having multiple devices commanding your attention all the time – media multitasking. This happens in the workplace and at home all the time. Our attention is constantly split between places, offering seemingly endless ways for our apps and devices to track us. All these movements and interactions offer additional points of data for collection, leading to more opportunities for advertisers to target users. Recording these various points of data is the key to unlocking monetization for advertising providers.

I’ve spent a lot of this past year learning about advertising technologies, both from a historical and current trend perspective. I’ve attended multiple panels hosted by a variety of sponsors including publications, consulting firms, and technology providers. In a space so broad and high touch, there’s much to explore. My goal is to share some of the more interesting trends I’ve learned about to date, all of which have a direct impact on people, how they live and work with devices and ads every day. I want to explore a couple of implications of this new age of media multitasking, the opportunities that it brings to advertisers, and what it may mean for users.

Data, data, & more data

There are seemingly infinite places you may encounter an ad – even in your chats with an LLM, ads are following you everywhere. And why is Instagram so elite at targeting ads for you? The answer is data. For years, advertisers relied on tracking cookies and 3rd party data to follow you around the internet. With new privacy rules and regulations, a lot of that is changing. Now the most valuable data is what you share directly with brands, whether that be preferences, purchases, or website interactions. This information along with the evolving technology landscape is changing the way we think about data. This data allows company to personalize experiences for their customers – whether that be relevant recommendations, special pricing promotions, or personalized newsletters. This type of personalization seems like a win-win for many reasons: buyers find things they want easier, companies to grow their revenue, purchasers are happy with their recommendations and return for more. Data is the key.

An ad for every person

With this new age of data collection and information brings some key trends reshaping advertising today. Firstly, brands want to match ads to what you’re interested and interacting with, not just who you are. Contextual advertising looks to align ads to the content you are consuming. A great example of this is watching a cooking show and then seeing an ad for kitchen gadget. This type of advertising is simple to execute as it doesn’t necessarily require a brand to know exactly who you are. Secondly, creative automation is making it possible to produce dozens of ad variations quickly. Think of it like this – imagine a world in which every ad you see is personalized to you, with visuals or sounds that resonate with you. With the maturation of AI, this type of scale becomes much more achievable for brands. Creative generation models will make it possible for every person to see their own tailored version of an ad. Finally, agentic AI is starting to automate the behind the scenes work in advertising workflows – things like campaign planning and optimization, forecasting, etc. Fewer manual processes means that advertisers can focus on more strategic branding and partnerships that will lead to more revenue opportunities rather than manual operational work.

Personalization, but amplified

With these trends in mind, it’s worth exploring how AI might reshape the industry in ways were only beginning to understand. Today, ~60% of Google searches result in zero clicks – meaning people are getting their answers directly from AI and not websites. As Google continues to push their ‘AI Mode’ experience, this number will likely continue to grow. The same shift is happening with chatbots. More people are turning to conversational AI for recommendations, research, and shopping, creating a new surface for advertising to infiltrate. This trend is key – the data is incredibly more powerful. When you chat with AI, you’re not just clicking; you’re sharing context, preferences, and even stories about yourself and your life. That first-party data is the most valuable for generating relevant ads and recommendations that are helpful instead of banners you scroll past. The challenge for companies with access to all this new information is making these moments feel relevant without breaking trust. But just let yourself think about all of someone’s personal chats with an LLM being fed to an advertiser. That Instagram ad starts to feel creepily personal.

A new era

The advertising industry is at an inflection point as we traverse through a new information age. The next few years will be full of experimentation as brands, publishers, and platforms figure out how to make the most of this new landscape. Creating 1000 versions of the same ad with an AI model sounds great in theory, but brand safety is key concern. We have a long way to go for these models to mature, but something is for certain. You and your data is valuable, and advertisers will do whatever they can to take it and leverage it for their (and in theory your) own benefit.