AI, Attention, Brand Safety, Campaign Strategy, Publishers, Revenue | 5 min read

AI is Rewriting the Attention Economy, Advertisers are at Risk of Getting Sidelined

AI is rewriting the attention economy. Perplexity’s “citations, not clicks” payouts and Cloudflare’s pay-per-crawl model mark a new phase where platforms set the rules of visibility. Unless brands and agencies demand clarity, control, and real behavioral signals, performance will be optimized to interfaces, not outcomes.

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  • AI is Rewriting the Attention Economy, Advertisers are at Risk of Getting Sidelined

    AI is rewriting the attention economy. Perplexity’s “citations, not clicks” payouts and Cloudflare’s pay-per-crawl model mark a new phase where platforms set the rules of visibility. Unless brands and agencies demand clarity, control, and real behavioral signals, performance will be optimized to interfaces, not outcomes.

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  • When Agentic AI Takes the Wheel, Who’s Watching the Road?

    Speed feels like smarts in advertising, but most “autonomous” systems optimize on labels and averages rather than behavior in context. They can’t see scroll, true in-view time, ad density, or what happens after the impression. Data without depth is a liability; the edge now is first-party, behavior-rich signals learned across environments.

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  • Your Media Plan is Still Yours – Until it Isn’t

    Platforms like X aren’t building AI to support advertisers - they’re building it to control the process. Systems like Grok optimize for what’s measurable inside their ecosystem, not for a brand’s broader goals. Automation without visibility isn’t strategy, it’s dependency and that shift is one every advertiser should be paying attention to.

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  • The Web’s Closing Doors – And AI’s Feeling the Lock

    Recently, Cloudflare took the unusual step of publicly calling out Perplexity AI for scraping publisher content without permission. And they didn’t hold back - accusing the company of disguising its crawler, bypassing robots.txt rules, and consuming massive bandwidth without attribution or consent. Cue the familiar debate: who owns online content? Should AI assistants be allowed to “learn” from everything on the web? Is scraping theft - or fair use?

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  • We Now Know What Ad Was Served. We Still Don’t Know if it Mattered.

    The IAB’s new ACIF standard brings much-needed structure to creative asset tracking in programmatic advertising. It’s a meaningful step — but knowing what was served isn’t the same as knowing if it mattered. This piece explores what ACIF fixes, what it doesn’t, and why understanding the experience of an ad is key to measuring true impact.

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  • When Budgets Shrink, Transparency Becomes Power

    Today’s media teams aren’t just asked to drive results; they’re asked to defend them. In a market where ad budgets are under the microscope and every dollar must prove its worth, clarity and efficiency win. It’s no longer about spending more — it’s about spending smarter. The brands that can surface waste, double down on what works, and adapt in real time will be the ones that thrive in this new media economy.

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  • In Real-Estate and in AdTech – Location is (Almost) Everything

    You can have the best ad in the world - high-performing creative, long time in view, shown to an engaged user. But if it’s squeezed between seven other ads on a cluttered page? It’s not going to land. That’s the part we don’t talk about enough. The environment. The layout. The density. The visual noise around the impression. Let’s talk about two under appreciated KPIs that shape that environment.

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  • The Open Web Just Got More Transparent (Sort Of)

    OpenSincera is a bold step toward greater transparency in MarTech. This free API gives open access to inventory data across the web, signaling a shift toward more informed planning and smarter decision-making. But how far does this visibility really go - and what comes next for advertisers, publishers, and the open web?

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  • If an Ad Falls in the Forest, Was it Ever Really Seen?

    You’ve heard the standard: 50% of an ad’s pixels, in view, for at least one continuous second. That’s the industry benchmark for viewability. It’s also the bare minimum. And it tells us very little about whether a user actually saw the ad - let alone engaged with it or remembered it.

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  • We All Think We Know What Ad Quality is. But Could There Be More Than What Meets the Eye?

    Let’s start with what everyone agrees on: ad quality matters. It matters for advertisers trying to get results. It matters for publishers looking to maintain credibility. And it matters for the end users - yes, the ones we’re all supposedly optimizing for - who just want to read the content they came for without being bombarded, interrupted, or ignored.

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  • Advertisers are Paying for the Problem Everyone Else is Ignoring

    In digital advertising, everyone gets paid when an ad is served. Doesn’t matter who saw it. Doesn’t matter if anyone saw it. If there’s an impression logged, someone gets a check. Except one player: the advertiser. And ironically, they’re the only ones with no real control over the system.

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  • You’re Not Predicting Behavior – You’re Guessing. Please Stop.

    Too often, marketing strategies are built on outdated insights, six-month-old personas, and assumptions dressed up as decisions. The result? Wasted budgets, missed opportunities, and performance that looks great in theory but fails in practice.

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