The Traffic Report

Read an AI summary of the Argentina–Cape Verde World Cup game and you’ll find that nearly everything that made it remarkable has been stripped away.

If you’re worried AI is coming for your job, you’re half right. Just not for the reason you think. It’s not that the machine is more efficient than you. It’s that efficiency was never what made you valuable.

Advertising is growing, but the growth hides the fact that some sectors are burning hot and others are ice cold. The problem is we can’t pit these sectors against each other like we are. Publishers need advertising, and advertising needs publishers. Let’s make sure publishers have a seat at the table.

I don’t care how low you are in the organization, but if you can get time with your CFO or someone at that level, learn what the vision is and then create your own models that you can share with them. Five year goals are met one impression at a time.

How do you prepare for a climb when you can’t see the route? Not with a step-by-step plan. A plan is a list of moves, and it only works if the wall stays put. The first time a hold crumbles, your plan is just directions to a place that’s gone.

In one sense, the world of publishing that most of us have built our careers around is gone. But the world as a whole needs publishing to hold fast. Human-created, fact-based content is more valuable than the market currently understands.

We’re in a world right now where the only constant is that everything and everyone wants our attention, and people only have so much attention to give. What the platforms have learned is pulling us back and forth with conflicting stories holds our attention better than anything else: it confirms my biases while simultaneously testing them. 

Last week, someone on a panel described their AI workflow in a way I have not been able to shake. They set an agent in motion, then go work out. When they get back, they review what happened, kick off the next agent, and go take a shower.

The future is ours to define. That’s my takeaway from last week’s Beeler.Tech events, Navigator NYC and AI Publisher Response. I don’t say that with a false sense of optimism. It’s all hard work from here on out. But it’s hard work that we’ll do together. 

Possible is like the Mos Eisley Cantina, perhaps with slightly less scum and villainy. There, people talk about AI differently than they do on my planet, Beeler Prime. Like the Force, marketing is a foregone conclusion: it is everywhere.