Content provenance is no longer a conversation we can “circle back to” later. If we’re not willing to make these decisions for ourselves now, we’re not going to like what everyone else decides on our behalf.
Google isn’t wrong that users want better answers. They do. AI search can be genuinely useful, especially for complex queries and comparisons. But it still needs to be supported by people doing the original work. Without them, the search machine becomes useless.
If sell-side decisioning becomes another opaque toll booth, publishers will lose confidence, buyers will question the economics, and the open internet will have recreated the problems it claimed to solve.
I’m tired. A lot of my friends in ad ops are tired. We keep being asked to absorb the same preventable problems on behalf of organizations that have decided learning isn’t worth the time it takes.
We know trust matters. We can feel what its absence does to a culture, a business, a public, an audience. We know what it costs when nobody believes anybody. Yet we keep clinging to the same systems that profit from distrust, confusion, exhaustion, and dependency.
Intent has been treated as a targeting label rather than a human truth. The gap between the two is where publisher revenue leaks, buyer trust erodes, and campaigns quietly underperform.
For all the ways this job gets flattened by other people, the truth is ad ops people understand more of the business than we usually get credit for.
Shareholders want growth at all costs, quarter after quarter. That’s why you see the clutter, the clickbait, the short-term revenue plays. No one thinks this is good for the audience, but no one cares. The only story Wall Street wants to hear is growth.