• by Joshua Lowcock , December 12, 2025

Digital advertising has become the fast food of marketing: cheap, convenient, scalable and engineered for short-term satisfaction, but ultimately low in nutritional value. And in a world of  autoplaying videos, reaction triggers and animated banners, most digital media doesn’t hold enough value to stand out — it’s as disposable as junk food.

Moreover, marketers are becoming increasingly disconnected from the process. We use algorithms that optimize for clicks, not connection, and when impressions and CPMs barely register as a rounding error on a budget spreadsheet, it’s easy to forget that behind each one is a real person.

The truth is, you can’t optimize your way to meaning.

Attention is not a commodity

Marketers say we want meaningful engagement, but in our relentless pursuit of efficiency, we’ve let programmatic algorithms prioritize cheap impressions over real connections to the point that we’ve forgotten there’s a person on the other side.

And principal-based media is making things worse. With the promise of “low-cost media,” “cheaper agency fees,” and effortless automation, it’s easy to become hooked on convenience. This approach sacrifices significance for scale at the risk of turning our budgets into self-perpetuating systems that favor empty reach over emotional resonance.

Attention is precious. With so many ads clogging up their screens, over half of consumers intentionally avoid them through adblocking software or ad-free subscriptions. It takes real effort to earn a person’s attention and more to earn their business, but the cost is worth it.

Faulty systems cost more than money

When media is bought purely on price, it often lands in places no brand would knowingly choose: content farms, piracy sites and misinformation peddlers, or worse — reports from the New York Times and CBS News about ads appearing beside racist videos are just the tip of the iceberg.

It’s usually not bad faith, just bad math. Advertising is exploitable when it’s cheap and paid less attention. Campaigns measured by volume allow bots to slip through the cracks. Fraudulent traffic can generate clicks and impressions that never involve a real person. Ironic that automating efficiency inadvertently pours resources into nonexistent audiences.

Malicious or not, the result remains: Dollars meant to build brands subsidize the disappearance of quality media content. Newsrooms are shuttered, investigative reporting is underfunded and public trust erodes. The very infrastructure of an informed society is undermined by numbers in a spreadsheet.

You can’t optimize on a broken system.

There’s no easy fix for a systemic problem, and optimization isn’t the answer. It’s time to demand better, to rethink media from the ground up. End the conflicts in the system, from principal-based trading to incentivizing bad actors from an over-dependence on “cheap” inventory. You can run a smart, efficient marketing machine at scale without sacrifice.

Marketing that connects and resonates is what really matters. It’s not just a math problem; it’s a human one.

If we end the desperate chase for cheap, we can escape from the world of disposable marketing, and get back to the fundamentals of successful media where the rarest thing you can offer is something worth remembering.