The advertising industry has a relatability problem.
Don’t just take it from me. Look at how the industry talks about itself.
“I’m going to talk about a few problems that folks might find relatable,” said one startup founder at a LiveRamp-hosted AI demo day that took place adjacent to last week’s Advertising Week New York (AWNY) event.
Those “relatable” problems he mentioned? When your team is caught in an engineering queue and can’t execute all its optimization ideas. Or that feeling when you need a personalization engine to feed into dynamic audiences. You know, just everyday kind of stuff everybody knows about.
Meanwhile, at the Zeta Live event, which also took place in New York City last week, one exec similarly mentioned a “relatable” problem: When a scrubbed, anonymized digital twin of a customer profile is mistakenly explained as a “synthetic ID.” Who can’t relate to that?
Losing touch, emphasis on ‘losing’
Unfortunately, the ad industry has become a community of people who say things like “This is going to sound relatable” and follow it up with a sentence that may as well be Martian to 99% of America. Living and working in a bubble of data-obsessed professionals has cultivated a detached way of thinking about how brands relate to consumers. And our generative AI obsession is further dehumanizing us.
I decided not to name names in the above examples, because this is an industrywide issue and not about particular people or vendors.
And the idea that marketing has become detached from the experiences of everyday people isn’t exactly a new idea. There is a longstanding joke that the ad tech category is terrible at branding itself. But not being able to talk about advertising without alienating people is also a very real handicap. Which is how phrases that paint the industry in a negative light, like “surveillance advertising” and “fingerprinting,” have gained coinage.
The AI revolution exacerbated this trend to an alarming degree.
To be fair, ad tech hasn’t gotten as bad as those frontier lab weirdos in Silicon Valley who are earnestly trying to have major religious bodies sanctify software as a form of life.
But we’ve lost the plot, or the pulse, or the zeitgeist – whatever it is that connects the economy of Madison Avenue advertising to millions and millions of US consumers.
Outsourcing empathy
Advertising as an industry has been one of the fastest adopters of AI. But we were already losing touch with regular people due to our deep-seated obsessions with optimization and efficiency.
Now, the bigger issue is that the advertisers have seemingly let AI services disintermediate their own fingers from the pulse of society.
It is now commonplace to see ads that feature weirdly lewd AI-generated photos of adolescent girls or gross-out pics of maggots, even from big-name brands (Skechers and Chewy, respectively, in these examples). And social feeds are cluttered with AI slop tuned to maximize negative engagement, like overly sexualized fruit or cute animals being victimized.
Meanwhile, creative agencies are folding right and left. And while agentic tech and AI were featured everywhere at AWNY, the concept of “creative” other than as an influencer or creator marketing output was almost nonexistent.
The big creative push at this year’s AWNY has been all about getting athletes and celebrity sponsors to join B2B marketing stunts. Zeta CEO David Steinberg interviewed Lindsey Vonn, Kevin Hart and Jason Sudeikis, while Wayne Gretzky and Trevor Noah were at AWNY with Rokt and Google, respectively, to name a few. Which I posit is an attempt to humanize businesses that have lost the knack themselves.
Noah, during his panel (alongside Creative Artists Agency, Publicis and Google), had an interesting aside about how hard it is for comedians to produce something that’s funny to different people all over the world.
“If you understand why people laugh, you understand who they are,” he said.
The ad industry has forgotten why people laugh. And we’re ignoring that regular people are often laughing at us.
John Mulaney made a similar but more directly accusatory point when he did a comedy set at Salesforce’s Dreamforce show a couple of years ago.
“You look like a group who looked at the self-checkout counters at CVS and thought, ‘This is the future,’” Mulaney said to groans from the crowd.
Since then, retail media and ad tech companies have only further overhauled the American retail experience in the names of data, efficiency, AI and optimization. The immiseration of American shoppers doesn’t enter the equation at all.
Clearly, nobody got the joke.
The ad industry, and data-driven advertising especially, has always had an uncomfortable butcher-esque aspect to its work. People enjoy browsing the web for free, but if they saw how advertising worked from the other side of the counter, there’d be upset stomachs everywhere.
Butchers do an important, wholesome job, even if it’s something that makes most people queasy. And advertisers do, too!
But people like meat, and they don’t like ads. Which is why this growing lack of empathy or relatability within the ad industry is a major cause for concern.
Most consumers who found themselves at AWNY or a similar industry gathering wouldn’t feel like customers at a butcher shop who feel icked out by seeing sausage come out of a mixing machine.
They might feel more like how a cow would feel wandering into a BBQ sauce convention.
And that’s a problem.
