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Ostensibly, Troutman Amin is a nationally recognized complex litigation and privacy consulting law firm based in Irvine, California. They handle multi-billion-dollar federal litigation and advise companies navigating emerging privacy and telecom law while the rules are still being written. That alone puts them in rare company.
And the industry is still acting like this is a UX tweak instead of a loss of sovereignty
Advertising Lost Control of the Moment of Choice
We were supposed to have Todd Parsons from Criteo on The ADOTAT Show.
We decided to re-record.
Not because the conversation didn’t work. It worked a little too well and still didn’t finish the job. We said a lot. We circled big ideas. We politely stepped around implications that deserved to be dragged into the light and interrogated. And when the microphones shut off, it was obvious that the most important thing hadn’t been named clearly enough yet.
That’s usually the tell. When a conversation ends but keeps talking to you afterward.
What stuck with me wasn’t a quote, or a product, or a framework. It wasn’t even “AI,” which is rapidly becoming the industry’s favorite way to avoid saying harder words.
It was this:
Advertising has lost control of the moment of choice.
Not as a prediction.
Not as a warning.
As a condition.
If that sentence makes you uncomfortable, good. The paid side of ADOTAT exists almost entirely to explain why that discomfort is rational.
When Advertising Still Ran the Room
For most of its modern history, advertising derived power from proximity. Not trust. Not love. Proximity.
If you could get close enough to a human being before they made a decision, you mattered. If you could interrupt them at the right moment, remind them often enough, surround them broadly enough, you could bend probability in your favor. Influence didn’t require elegance. It required persistence.
This is why the industry learned to worship reach and defend frequency like virtues instead of symptoms. This is why scale became synonymous with effectiveness and why entire ecosystems formed around making sure an ad could appear everywhere a human might hesitate.
The system tolerated waste because waste still worked at scale. It tolerated annoyance because annoyance still produced movement somewhere, eventually. It tolerated redundancy because redundancy was cheaper than missing the moment entirely.
Auctions flourished not because they were philosophically elegant, but because they priced access to indecision. Who gets in front of the person, where, how often, and at what cost.
All of this rested on one assumption no one bothered to challenge for a very long time:
The human would encounter the ad before deciding.
That assumption has quietly expired.
The Moment of Choice Didn’t Disappear. It Relocated.
There was no dramatic collapse. No emergency summit. No press release declaring the end of an era.
The moment of choice simply moved.
Upstream.
Inside software.
Away from the surfaces advertising was built to dominate.
People are no longer assembling decisions the way they used to. They are delegating them. Searching, comparing, summarizing, filtering, narrowing, evaluating, even purchasing are increasingly handled by systems acting on their behalf. Not as a grand philosophical statement about the future of humanity, but as a boring, practical response to friction.
People didn’t wake up one morning wanting agents. They woke up wanting fewer tabs, fewer bad options, fewer fake reviews, fewer wrong turns. Software stepped in because the old way was exhausting.
The decision still happens.
The transaction still clears.
Brands still win and lose.
Advertising just isn’t sitting in the chair anymore.
On ADOTAT+, we go line by line through where that chair moved, who now occupies it, and which parts of the stack are no longer even invited into the room.
This Is Not an “AI Advertising” Story
Calling this an “AI ads” shift is industry self-soothing. It’s a way of pretending the system is evolving when it’s actually being bypassed.
This isn’t about smarter targeting or better creative or faster optimization cycles. It’s about control being removed from the interruption layer entirely.
When decisions are mediated by software, the familiar levers start to fail:
Exposure stops being leverage.
Presence stops being power.
Frequency stops being influence.
Advertising becomes context, not command. Helpful if it’s useful. Invisible if it’s not. Entirely optional.
That’s not an upgrade.
It’s a demotion.
Why Behavioral Targeting Was Always the Wrong Mental Model
The industry’s favorite coping mechanism right now is to describe all of this as “behavioral targeting, but better.”
It isn’t.
Behavioral targeting was always reactive. Someone searched. Someone clicked. Someone browsed. The system followed them around like an overeager intern who arrived late to the meeting and spoke too loudly anyway.
Delegated systems don’t chase intent.
They anticipate it.
They infer what matters from context, constraints, history, and outcomes. They don’t wait for intent to leak into the open web. They don’t need a breadcrumb trail. They decide what belongs together before a human ever sees the options.
In that world, the central question shifts from “how relevant was the ad?” to something far more brutal:
Was this ever surfaced as an option at all?
Most ads never are. We unpack exactly how that filtration layer works, and why it quietly destroys whole categories of media spend, in ADOTAT+.
Helpful vs Creepy Was Never About Data
The industry spent a decade arguing as if data itself were the offense. It wasn’t. Data was just the instrument.
The real offense was pressure.
Pressure to click.
Pressure to act now.
Pressure applied without context, consent, or timing.
People didn’t revolt because ads were relevant. They revolted because ads were relentless. Relevance without restraint feels invasive. Accuracy without empathy feels coercive.
Delegated systems expose this instantly. Anything that adds friction stands out. Urgency feels aggressive. Interruptions feel irrational. Noise feels like sabotage.
Context, on the other hand, feels natural. Suggestions that belong together don’t register as ads at all. They register as assistance.
That distinction isn’t philosophical.
It’s structural.
The Ad Unit Didn’t Die. It Was Ignored.
Every few years, the industry declares the death of the ad unit with great theatrical seriousness, then quietly continues to transact through it because the bills still get paid.
The ad unit survived not because it was effective, but because it was legible. Countable. Comforting. It fit spreadsheets and procurement rituals. It allowed complexity to masquerade as rigor.
Delegated systems don’t see the packaging.
They don’t care how many times something rendered.
They don’t care where it appeared.
They don’t care how beautiful the format was.
They care whether it solved the problem.
Once needs are resolved upstream, impression logic collapses. Exposure stops being currency and becomes exhaust.
Why This Is on the Paid Side (and why now)
Everything above is the setup. The uncomfortable mechanics, the economic consequences, and the parts vendors politely avoid are on ADOTAT+.
Not because it’s premium content theater, but because independent analysis that threatens business models doesn’t get sponsored.
Right now, ADOTAT+ is 80% off through 2026. That’s not a gimmick. It’s a recognition that this transition is already underway, and most of the industry is still arguing about abstractions.
If you want the structural breakdowns, the parts that make CFOs uneasy, and the map of what survives when the moment of choice moves upstream, that’s where it lives.
Here’s a structured summary of the main points, key conclusions, and takeaways from “Advertising Lost Control of the Moment of Choice” condensed into a table format for clarity.
Section / Theme | Main Points | Conclusions & Lessons Learned |
|---|---|---|
Central Thesis | Advertising has lost control over the “moment of choice”—the point where a consumer decides what to buy or do. That moment has moved upstream into software systems. | The traditional advertising model—based on interrupting people before they decide—is now structurally obsolete. Power has shifted to software agents and decision systems. |
Advertising’s Former Power | Historically, ad influence came from proximity and interruption: being close to human decision points via repetition, reach, and frequency. | Scale and exposure once guaranteed influence, but those levers fail when humans no longer manually navigate decision processes. |
Shift in Decision-Making | Consumers now delegate decision-making to software—search, recommendation engines, voice agents, and AI systems that simplify choices. | The “moment of choice” didn’t vanish; it relocated away from media and into systems—reducing ad control. |
False Comfort of ‘AI Advertising’ | Industry narratives about “AI-enhanced ads” are self-soothing—they treat disruption as evolution. | This is not advertising getting smarter; it’s advertising being bypassed. The old control levers (exposure, reach, frequency) no longer matter when decisions happen inside closed systems. |
Failure of Behavioral Targeting | Behavioral targeting was reactive—following visible signals after intent appeared. Delegated systems anticipate need before intent is expressed. | The future question isn’t “Was my ad relevant?” but “Was my brand even considered as an option?”—most aren’t. |
Helpful vs. Creepy Dynamic | The problem in digital ads wasn’t data collection—it was pressure. People revolted against manipulation and interruption, not personalization itself. | Delegated systems reveal the true standard: usefulness vs. friction. Assistance is invisible; pressure feels irrational. |
Ad Unit Obsolescence | The ad unit persists because it’s countable, not because it’s effective—it comforts buyers and fits financial models. | Delegated systems ignore ad formats entirely. They solve for outcomes, not impressions. Exposure becomes exhaust, not currency. |
Auctions and Economics | Auctions priced access to indecision (probability of influence). Delegated systems resolve certainty instantly within a closed decision loop. | The auction logic collapses when the decision and transaction merge. Outcomes—not impressions—become the market’s clearing event. |
Implications for the Industry | Advertising isn’t “dead” but demoted. Control now resides upstream—in the decision-making infrastructure, not in ad delivery systems. | Agencies, DSPs, and SSPs are optimizing lower in the funnel—while true leverage has shifted upstream to platforms that mediate or automate consumer choice. |
Final Message | The power dynamic has reversed: software—not advertising—governs what gets considered. | The industry must accept that visibility ≠ influence and that competing for “the moment” now means integrating into or shaping the systems that own it. |
Stay Bold, Stay Curious, and Know More than You Did Yesterday.
This is usually where I do the ADOTAT+ upsell and pretend we’re all comfortable with how this works.
You read.
I write.
Someone asks if it can be free.
I get it. Free is familiar. Free is frictionless. Free is how most of this industry learned to confuse access with insight.
But ADOTAT+ exists because I got tired of selling sponsorships and being asked to sand down the truth until it fits neatly on a conference slide. I’m not interested in bending language, burying ledes, or pretending everyone is “aligned.”
I’m also not here to sell you keynote optimism or recycled LinkedIn wisdom with better lighting.
What you’re supporting instead is access to the conversations the industry keeps circling but won’t land.
Here’s what’s actually inside.
Not details. Signals.
You’ll be reading about what happens when algorithms stop assisting markets and start becoming the market.
About why attention is no longer the scarce resource, even though the industry keeps pricing media like it is.
About how decision-making is quietly migrating away from humans, and why that breaks almost every assumption baked into adtech, measurement, and attribution.
About the difference between optimization and purpose, and why software can scale one but not the other.
About why the ad unit isn’t “under threat” so much as becoming structurally irrelevant, not because people hate ads, but because the unit itself no longer maps to how decisions clear.
About how power has moved upstream of impressions, into systems that decide what options are ever surfaced at all.
And about the part nobody wants to say out loud yet:
this isn’t advertising evolving. It’s advertising being absorbed.
No pay-for-play.
No conference varnish.
No pretending this is a trend instead of a reordering.
If you want the free version, you’ll still get smart writing.
If you want the uncomfortable version, the one that explains why things feel off and where the gravity is actually moving, that’s on the other side.
Stay Bold, Stay Curious, and Know More than You Did Yesterday.
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