Shirley Marschall

Articles by Shirley All articles by Shirley

• He Said, She Said, Bot Said in Marketing Insider on 04/24/2025
  

  We're not just fighting fraud anymore -- we're fighting over fraud. And in the process, we're losing something just as critical: credibility.

• 6 Degrees of Optimization: The Distance Between Brands And People in Marketing Insider on 04/17/2025
  

  With every new layer of optimization, something slips. The signal gets filtered. The intent gets diluted. And the human gets lost.

• Data's Identity Crisis: How Ad Tech Lost The Plot in Marketing Insider on 04/10/2025
  

  Ad tech has spent the last decade trying to simplify data and somehow made it more confusing than ever.

• Ad Tech Fragmentation: The Problem No One Actually Wants to Solve in Marketing Insider on 04/03/2025
  

  Multiple players -- publishers, agencies, platforms, walled gardens -- benefit from keeping the ecosystem fragmented.

• Ad Tech Is Optimizing For People -- But Who's Actually Seeing The Ads? in Marketing Insider on 03/27/2025
  

  As consumers delegate more tasks to AI -- like shopping, research and decision-making -- AI itself is becoming the consumer.

• The Ad-Tech Paradox: More X, Same Y in Marketing Insider on 03/19/2025
  

  Instead of increasing efficiency and opportunity, oversaturation is leading to fragmentation, inefficiencies, and diminishing returns.

• The Privacy Illusion: How First-Party Data Became Ad Tech's Biggest Loophole in Marketing Insider on 03/14/2025
  

  The shift to first-party data hasn't democratized advertising. It's just concentrated power in fewer hands.

• Ad Tech's Muddy Middle: The Industry's Endless Tug-of-War in Marketing Insider on 03/03/2025
  

  The only constant in ad tech is change. The best strategies don't rely on absolutes, they evolve with the ecosystem.

• Ad Tech Isn't Broken -- It's Working Exactly As It's Incentivized To in Marketing Insider on 02/24/2025
  

  When performance is measured in clicks, impressions, and ROAS, the system optimizes for those numbers, at the expense of everything else.

• We've Prioritized Everything -- Except Frequency Capping in Marketing Insider on 02/14/2025
  

  Poor frequency capping is not just a consumer frustration. It's a waste of ad spend that directly impacts performance and brand perception.

Comments by Shirley All comments by Shirley

• Data's Identity Crisis: How Ad Tech Lost The Plot by Shirley Marschall (Marketing Insider on 04/10/2025)
  

  Thank you, really appreciate your kind words! Yes, it's scary how easily we forget the most important thing - humans/customers... 

• Targeting AIs And Filtering Invalid Human Traffic by Joe Mandese (Media 3.0 on 04/11/2025)
  

  Fascinating read! I predicted a two folded future - AI and human targted digital ads. You can find my article heret: https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/404600/ad-tech-is-optimizing-for-people-but-whos-actu.html - would love to hear your thoughts!

• Ad Tech Is Optimizing For People -- But Who's Actually Seeing The Ads? by Shirley Marschall (Marketing Insider on 03/27/2025)
  

  We’re still in the early days of AI and even more so when it comes to AI-filtered recommendations and advertising. You’re absolutely right that things are far from ideal right now. But to be fair, digital advertising has always been shaped by gatekeepers: search algorithms, social feeds, and now AI-powered assistants, predictive models, curated experiences, you name it. The crucial part, the human part, is keeping us in the loop. Because if we want people to feel seen, understood, and inspired, we can’t hand everything over to machines. It’s worrying how fast the focus is shifting to AI...and how easily we forget ourselves in the process.

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