• by Shirley Marschall , Featured Contributor, April 17, 2025

Ad tech is obsessed with optimization. Every signal, platform, algorithm, clean room, or assistant, is pitched as a way to bring brands closer to consumers.

But what if the opposite is happening?

What if optimization is just another word for abstraction?

From Conversation to Calculation

Once upon a time, advertising was a conversation. It wasn’t always precise or efficient, but it was direct. A brand spoke, the audience responded.

Today, that conversation is filtered through six degrees of optimization:

1. Search algorithms decide what people see.

2. Social feeds curate their attention.

3. Recommendation engines shape their preferences.

4. Predictive models guess what they might want.

5. AI assistants prefilter decisions.

6. Synthetic audiences and automated bidding target users in ways marketers may never truly understand.

Each layer adds distance between a brand’s intention and a consumer’s experience. We call it personalization, but it’s really mediation.

The Optimization Trap

The industry has trained itself to believe that more data and smarter systems bring brands closer to their audiences -- if we just measure better, predict faster, and personalize harder, we’ll finally close the gap.

But with every new layer of optimization, something slips.

The signal gets filtered.

The intent gets diluted.

And the human gets lost.

• Brands optimize for metrics, because that’s what gets approved in the next quarterly review.

• Platforms optimize for engagement, because attention is the real currency.

• AI optimizes for prediction, because accuracy beats nuance in a machine’s world.

But none of these optimize for understanding -- or meaning or trust.

Ad tech has become brilliant at hitting KPIs, but dangerously clumsy at staying connected to the people behind the clicks.

Because performance is easy to measure, but relevance is not.

And somewhere along the way, optimization got mistaken for insight.

The Illusion of Proximity

The industry loves to call itself “consumer-centric.”personalization, targeting, and real-time relevance are pitched as signs of intimacy, as if brands are speaking directly to individuals.

But that connection is anything but direct.

It may feel like brands are advertising to people.

But they’re really advertising through systems, each one adding another degree of separation between message and meaning.

Consumers still see the ad.

But what they see is pre-filtered, pre-ranked and pre-interpreted.

The conversation hasn’t stopped. But it’s no longer human-to-human. It’s brand to machine to model to moment to user.

When Convenience Becomes Control

In pursuit of efficiency, people have started outsourcing their instincts.

•Spotify sets the mood.

• Google ranks their choices.

• Amazon surfaces what they “need.”

• AI assistants search, filter, and will eventually even buy on their behalf.

What began as personalization has quietly turned into automation -- automation into delegation, and delegation into decision-making by proxy.

It’s not just that brands are separated from consumers. Consumers are now separated from their own choices.

And that’s not convenience. That’s control.

Optimizing Ourselves Out of Relevance

The irony? The more data we use to “know” the customer, the less we actually understand them.

Emotion doesn’t live in bid streams. Curiosity doesn’t show up in identity graphs.

Trust can’t be automated.

Each optimization layer promises relevance but delivers distance.

A perfectly timed message means nothing if no one’s truly listening.

A Call to Reconnect

This isn’t about rejecting AI or automation. It’s about naming what the industry has built: a system optimized for performance, but distanced from people.

Each layer promised connection.

Together, they’ve made it harder to see and even harder to trust.

We won’t rewind the stack. We won’t remove the layers.

But we can stop mistaking mediation for intimacy, and start being honest about the distance we’ve created.

Because the risk isn’t just that ads become less effective.

It’s that we forget there was ever a person on the other side.