A Future Without Advertising

People are online all the time, yet they skip ads, block them and don't trust them. Ana Milicevic, born in Belgrade and co-founder of the New York consultancy Sparrow Advisers, calls this the advertising paradox of 2020. She traces it to the fact that neither the internet nor the technology behind it was built for ads. She opens with a line from a friend's young daughter: "Don't worry, Mom, I skipped all the ads."

You'll learn why Facebook, Google and Amazon take almost 70 % of digital ad budgets in the US, how programmatic advertising undercut the price of publishers' own inventory, and what data leakage and ad fraud mean for consumers and brands. Ana advises advertisers to audit their tech stack, put one person in charge of customer experience and bring storytelling back into advertising, and tells publishers to stop competing with the platforms on scale. In the Q&A she explains why one-to-one personalisation shouldn't be the goal and what marketers can learn from Nike and the film studio Blumhouse.