Two cities, same anxiety.
This week, advertising's biggest names gathered in Miami for the brand-new Jupiter Festival and in New York for the fourth annual Advertising Week. Different venues, different vibes — one had Third Eye Blind playing a Tuesday night set, the other had a crowded hotel district called The Penn District. But underneath the swag bags and rooftop happy hours, everyone was asking the same question.
If AI can find, buy, and measure media on its own, what's left for the humans?
That's the real story here. Not the cookies with icing logos (yes, Jupiter Festival handed those out). Not the drone footage of cocktail parties. The story is that an entire industry built on relationships, middlemen, and gut instinct is watching those things get automated in real time.
Let's start with the obvious moves. TikTok announced it's extending its advertising reach beyond its own app in the U.S. and rolled out a new AI shopping agent. Meta revealed it's testing an AI assistant that can plan a campaign, create it, set the budget, pick the targeting, and remember what worked last time. Not suggest. Do.
OpenAI is adding visual ads to ChatGPT and testing brand-safety tools with DoubleVerify and Integral Ad Science. Translation: the company that built a chatbot three years ago is now building an ad platform, and the old gatekeepers are scrambling to plug into it before it's too late.
Here's the question nobody wants to say out loud at these conferences: if an advertiser can just tap an agent to find the right inventory and buy it, what's the point of a demand-side platform? One reporter at Advertising Week put it plainly — the middleman's job description is getting shorter by the week.
I find that kind of disruption fascinating, honestly. I've spent years watching industries insist their way of doing things is permanent, right up until it isn't. I left a conventional career path behind in 2017 to travel full-time, and the number one thing people told me back then was that it couldn't work, that the old model was the only model. Turns out there's almost always another way, if you're willing to ask "what happens if I try this instead?"
That's exactly what's happening in advertising right now. At Jupiter Festival, execs admitted the funnel is basically dead. Clicks don't matter the way they used to. What matters is whether your brand gets recommended inside an AI answer. Nobody's fully cracked how to measure that yet, but they know the old scoreboard is obsolete.
Meanwhile, the open web is under real pressure. As AI systems scoop up publisher traffic for their own answers, sites are leaning harder into subscriptions and off-platform ad extensions just to survive. One insider described advertising's current measurement problem with a question worth sitting with: how do you compare the value of a 20-minute YouTube integration to a 30-second Super Bowl ad? Nobody has a clean answer.
Not everything is spinning out of control, though. Retail media is booming — McDonald's and Delta both announced new media networks this month, joining Walmart, Amazon, Target, and The Home Depot. The lesson these companies have learned is simple: owning just your product isn't enough anymore. You need to own the data and the inventory too.
And in a twist nobody saw coming a few years back, physical advertising is having a moment. Out-of-home and digital billboards are growing again as people's trust in digital feeds slides. Sometimes the old thing works precisely because everyone assumed it was dead.
So what does all this mean if you're not running a media agency? It means the ground is shifting under every industry built on "the way we've always done it." Advertising just happens to be feeling it first and loudest right now.
I didn't build my life around predicting markets. I built it around staying curious enough to keep asking what's next, and flexible enough to move when the answer changes. Advertising's getting a crash course in that same lesson this fall, whether it wanted one or not.
What industry are you watching get rewritten in real time? Worth paying attention to — because the next one might be closer to home than you think.
Source: ADWEEK
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