In 2016, TV advertising was in trouble. People were canceling their cable subscriptions by the millions, ratings were slipping, and advertisers were pouring billions of dollars into digital platforms that promised bigger audiences than TV at a much lower cost.
That April, Buzzfeed broadcast a live stream of two staffers in white coats and safety goggles wrapping rubber bands around a watermelon. The tension mounted as the rubber bands piled up, one at a time, hundreds and hundreds of them, squeezing the watermelon until it began to buckle. When it finally burst, sending pulp flying and its hosts shrieking, the live stream had been viewed more than 3 million times. CNBC called it the future of television.
Except it wasn’t. There was no way to tell how much of the audience actually watched the spectacle, or only watched it for a few seconds. The video may have simply run on autoplay as they scrolled past. But for advertisers, every three-second “view” counted as an impression, which was the industry’s basic unit of value.
Advertising had always been the business of attention. But attention is finite. There are only 24 hours in a day, and people can look at only so many things at once. But the algorithms that controlled digital advertising weren’t built to reflect that reality. They were given an incentive: maximize ad revenue. So they learned to produce and promote whatever generated the most impressions. An impression was counted each time an ad, or the content around it, appeared on a screen for a few seconds, whether or not anyone actually noticed it.
When the algorithms ran short of real attention to sell, they expanded into areas that required no attention at all: intercepting demand that already existed and claiming credit for purchases people would have made anyway. That set off a snowball effect. The supply of ad inventory exploded. The result was a flood of cheap, low-quality impressions—a subprime market for human attention. As supply soared, prices fell for every seller of advertising. Never mind that TV commercials were graded differently. Scrolling past an exploding watermelon on your phone was treated the same way as watching every minute of a prime-time drama or a World Series game.
A vicious cycle
As television was forced to compete on digital’s terms, networks ran more minutes of advertising, which made the viewing experience worse and probably played a role in pushing even more viewers toward streaming and ad-free platforms. It was a vicious cycle. The less attention was worth, the more “impressions” the industry had to manufacture to make up the difference.
As traditional TV ads lost value, some networks experimented with cutting ad loads and rethinking the commercial break altogether. At the time, Jonathan was in charge of advertising at Fox Networks Group, and we experimented with a bunch of new formats: six-second spots, premium slots at the start and end of commercial breaks and even single-sponsor streams with minimal interruptions. Other networks pursued their own versions of the same idea, promising viewers fewer, better ads and offering advertisers more engaged audiences. These new formats provided a better value exchange for viewers’ attention. But they were a hard sell. Buyers asked why six seconds should cost more than 30. The real estate and retail industries valued placement and scarcity, but when it came to the advertising market, brands wanted volume. Real change required advertisers to let their agencies take risks and most wouldn’t do it.
A decade later, the stakes are even higher. There are still only 24 hours in a day, but artificial intelligence can now generate an unlimited supply of content. Feeds are filling up with AI-generated videos, and platforms are automating every step of advertising, from writing an ad to targeting the audience to placing the buy. There are now even ads inside AI assistants. ChatGPT says it’s on track to generate $1 billion in annual ad revenue, and more than 100,000 advertisers are running campaigns on the platform.
The risk is that an endless supply of content chasing a finite supply of attention will make each impression cheaper and less meaningful than ever. The subprime market for attention will continue to grow until advertising looks less like a market for attention and more like a toll on global commerce. AI will continue to optimize everything that is measurable, while the things most meaningful for people and businesses, such as culture, storytelling, trust and human connection—the hardest things for machines to measure—will be neglected.
But this new era of AI also creates a rare chance for a reset. AI can be built to serve people rather than keep them scrolling; helping us manage our time, filter information, make better decisions, and reclaim our attention. That would free us to spend it on what matters most: the stories we love, the experiences that bring us joy and, ideally, genuine connection with other people. That’s a future worth building.
Excerpted from Human Dot AI: How the Fight For Your Attention Became the World’s Biggest Business, by Joe Marchese and Jonathan Bing