This Is the Highlight of My Week.
I'm Concerned Too.
Right now, I could be doing literally anything else.
Doom-scrolling LinkedIn like it's a personality trait.
Googling "am I dehydrated or dying" for the third time today.
Starting a sourdough starter I'll abandon by Thursday.
Convincing myself that buying new running shoes counts as cardio.
You know. Normal human behavior. The kind that doesn't require sentences.
But no. Here I am. Typing words into a void. Voluntarily. On a Sunday.
And the truly unhinged part? This is the best part of my week.
Welcome to ADOTAT Sunday.
If you're still here, congratulations. You're either invested, confused, or just waiting for me to say something stupid so you can screenshot it.
Either way. Door's closed. You're in.
A column for Sunday Adotat
The Costco Theory of Advertising
Look, I'm going to tell you something the ad tech industry doesn't want to hear: Costco on a Sunday afternoon understands human beings better than your entire programmatic stack.
That's not a joke. It's an indictment.
What Costco figured out that you didn't
People drive to Costco. They fight for parking. They push through crowds of families buying 48-packs of paper towels. Why? Because they trust that the chaos will be worth it. The deals are real. The finds are actual finds. The samples are—and this is key—free food that tastes good.
Meanwhile, ad tech treats attention like it's a natural resource to strip-mine. Then everyone acts shocked—shocked!—when consumers install ad blockers and lie on surveys about brand recall.
The treasure hunt works because it's actually fun. Algorithmic "discovery" is just the same three ads following you around the internet like a desperate ex.
Sampling vs. Surveillance
Here's where it gets uncomfortable for the data-industrial complex.
At Costco, someone hands you a tiny cup of ravioli. You can take it. You can walk past. You can come back for seconds like a normal human being. It's a transaction built on consent and—here's a wild concept—actually experiencing the product.
Programmatic advertising? That's tracking you across 47 websites, building a "probabilistic" profile, then serving you an ad for shoes you already bought. And calling it "relevance."
One is a gift. The other is surveillance with a marketing budget.
The anthropology problem
The people designing these systems have apparently never watched actual humans interact with media. Go sit in a living room while a family endures eight unskippable CTV ads. Watch the phones come out by ad three. Watch the eye-rolling by ad six. That's your "premium inventory."
Costco gets context. Hungry shopper, cart in hand, sample kiosk near the frozen aisle? That's a sale. Your fancy ID graph doesn't know if someone's in a buying mood or doom-scrolling at 2 AM. It just knows they once googled "running shoes."
The actual theory
If the ad industry wanted to be less hated—and let's be honest, that bar is underground—here's the framework:
Act like you're in a membership relationship. People should know who's talking to them and what they get out of it. Not "a slightly less annoying experience."
Design for wandering. Stop panicking if someone doesn't convert in three touches. Build spaces people actually want to be in.
Make the value obvious. A good ad should feel like a sample—useful, tangible, zero obligation. Not a tollbooth on the information highway.
Optimize for trust. Costco caps its markups. It pays decent wages. It plays the long game. Ad platforms crank hidden take rates and wonder why publishers and advertisers both feel ripped off. Funny how that works.
Because the unit of analysis is the impression, not the person. Fatigue, delight, annoyance—these are "noise" in the model, not design constraints.
Because the business model rewards infinite impressions, not disciplined curation.
Because there's no dashboard column for "this ad felt like a gift instead of a tax."
The adtech industry spent two decades building the most sophisticated machinery in history to make people actively hate advertising more than they already did.
Costco just handed out free samples.
Guess which one has a 93% membership renewal rate.
