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đź’ˇThe post below is an adapted transcript from a presentation I gave at the Mediaspace Global Changemakers' Summit 2026. I pretended to be talking to the audience from 2030. Greetings from October 2030! Today, everything that AI can generate is infinite and close to free: content, ad creatives, reach.
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“The open web is shrinking”. “The open web is dying”. “The open web is valuable”. “Save the open web!” The “open web” as the advertising industry uses it is an ad tech creation. The programmatic open marketplace took the name to clean up its image following all sorts of scandals
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Were media owners thriving before generative AI went mainstream? Were they self-sustainable before GDPR came into force? Were they making the most of their advertising revenue with this or that ID solution? Will agentic AI in advertising solve their monetisation problems? The list of questions could continue. Each of
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Premium media owners have one commercial asset that generative AI cannot reproduce at scale: the trust audiences place in their brands. Every other historical advantage publishers once had with audiences – voice, expertise, production quality – is being flattened by AI systems that churn out good-enough output in seconds. Zero-click
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Every conversation at Cannes this year was about AI. The message between the lines confirmed the opposite: the future of monetisation lies in humanity. Neil Vogel, CEO of People Inc., provocatively defined the 2026 Cannes Lions as “the first post-ad tech, post-open web Cannes” on Brian Morrissey’s
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In 2009 I failed to convince sports businesses to monetise their fans like media audiences. Seventeen years later, Fastbreak Digital comes back to life.
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I have always found the comparison of digital advertising to an ecosystem more revealing than the cosmetic use of the word across the industry. It highlights the importance of its different components but also explains why imbalance is not a sustainable state. That holds true with AI, for different reasons.
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For 15 years, much of adtech sold a lie the industry was happy to buy: infinite reach without sacrificing quality. The pitch survived only because quality media owners legitimised with their presence pipes full of Made for Advertising (MFA) inventory and the long tail of low-quality content. Generative AI
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Programmatic made real the delusion of infinity. Infinite reach. Infinite inventory. Infinite data. What wasn't infinite was quality. It remained the differentiator for premium media owners, even as everything else became commoditised. With generative AI, even quality could become abundant. When quality becomes abundant, it becomes cheap and
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There is a critical difference between predicting the future and simply observing the present, yet current industry forecasts often confuse the two. Reading through the latest round of 2026 industry forecasts, there is far too much of the latter: concepts that have been written on the wall for years, sold
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Over the past two years, AI has moved from experimental to operational across media organisations. Newsrooms are using it for research and drafting, product teams for personalisation, commercial teams for audience insights. The technology works, adoption is real, and early wins are visible. Yet something curious is happening: whilst individual
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AI agents and so-called “super signal aggregators” are being framed as the saviors of premium publishers and advertisers who prioritize high-quality media. But these technologies could perpetuate programmatic’s worst practices and push premium media brands into a Commoditization 2.0 era. Commoditization 1.0 occurred when quality