The future of advertising

Consider ad spends as a tax. It is the payment that the business makes to the market in exchange for visibility.

In the age of agents — when the primary interface to the internet is a multitude of cooperating AIs pursuing individual goals — the question is not whether that tax survives, but who collects it.

Note that this brand often has no correlation to the actual product quality. Once a brand crosses a certain threshold of visibility, it transforms into a part of the general zeitgeist.

Consider an individual making a non-critical spending decision on an electronic luxury item, say noise canceling headphones. Traditionally, this individual would have trawled through multiple online forums, user reviews and ratings to discover the best possible option. Today however, the individual can simply ask their AI. The AI knows its human — that this one prizes design, that one silence — and predicts not clicks but satisfaction: whether the buyer will still be raving about the purchase a year in.

This innovation provides a fresh pathway to high quality start-ups seeking to compete with industry monoliths. The enterprising start ups, incentivised to get best product reviews, pay their ‘advertising tax’ to AI agents, who in return, include them in their trawling models as an option to consider recommending.

The user (the ultimate payer of this advertising tax) has a higher quality of life, the AI makes money, and the product creators make money.

The brand, it turns out, was a compression algorithm for trust — built for a world where attention was scarce and verification expensive. Agents make verification cheap. Advertising stops buying attention and starts buying inclusion in an index, and the whole game turns on a question the old game never had to answer: does the index stay honest? An agent that ranks by kickback rather than quality is just a billboard with a friendlier voice. The first market where users can audit their own tout will be the first where the advertising tax finally buys what it always claimed to — a better product.