A chat with Jess Davies

2030

💡The 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.

The “open web” for premium media companies should never have existed

“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

AI is not media companies’ biggest challenge

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

The Funnel Is Dead. Build A Trust Loop Or Lose Your Audience To AI | Adexchanger

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