059: What is the Future of Advertising?

What this episode covers

In today's episode, we discuss the future of advertising, which we define as the 'sale of attention.' People mostly hate ads, but why do they? Is it possible to make ads so well targeted that people actually enjoy the experience? We discuss the remarkably constant amount of advertising as a percent of GDP over a long stretch of history. We ponder the ways accelerating technologies might allow for better metrics and better ad designs in the future, and we wonder whether a large-scale consumer collapse might disrupt advertising's steady growth. Speculating on the future, we imagine that nearly everything that remains scarce in the future might one day be ad-supported.

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