Here is a sentence you will never hear at an ad tech conference: consumers are fine with ads.

Not "tolerate." Not "have learned to ignore." Fine. They expect them, they click them, and they occasionally buy the thing. Say that on a panel in Cannes and somebody from a privacy startup will throw a branded water bottle at you.

Ricardo Belmar said it anyway. On The ADOTAT Show. To an ad tech audience. With a straight face.

"If people ignored ads and they didn't work at all, nobody ever clicks on a digital ad anywhere, then people would stop spending money. Advertisers would get the message."

Ricardo is the founder and host of the Retail Razor Podcast Network, a former retail marketing director at Microsoft, and a six-time RETHINK Retail top expert. He spends his days talking to the people who run stores. Which may explain why his view of the consumer sounds less like a LinkedIn thought leader and more like someone who has actually stood in a Best Buy.

His thesis, in three parts: consumers don't hate ads. Retail is still a people business. And agentic commerce is a new channel, not the end of the store. Every one of those is a fight somebody in this industry wants to have.

Ricardo's argument is almost rude in its simplicity. Follow the money.

"The numbers keep increasing. The advertising dollars are not going down, they're going up. The reason we see these numbers go up is because the mediums are working. They work more often than not."

Why does everyone believe the opposite? Because complaining performs. Social media trained all of us that the negative take travels farther. "Everyone loves to talk about things that they hate," he says. I pointed out that we used to have to write a letter to complain. Now every stubbed toe goes out to our closest five thousand friends.

Then he brought up the one everyone brings up. Amazon search is now an ad buffet. Thirty sponsored results, scattered top to bottom. Surely that proves people hate it?

Ricardo's answer: people know it's an ad, and they click anyway. He admits to one quirk. He often sees the sponsored listing sitting right next to the organic listing for the exact same product from the exact same seller, and he clicks the unpaid one out of spite. The seller is winning organically and still paying for the ad, he says, because they're hedging their bet.

For the record, I've been a Prime member since roughly year one. It says sponsored. I click past it. Occasionally I look, decide it's probably junk, and move on. Nobody has died.

I asked the obvious question. If everyone's so cool with ads, why is there an entire industry built to block them?

Ricardo's answer is the streaming business. Streaming was born as the anti-advertising product. Pay us, skip the commercials. "But what did every single streamer do? They went back on advertising and they created tiers that were ad supported to lower the cost, because guess what? That got them more subscribers."

Netflix included. Millions of people looked at a cheaper plan with ads and said, sure, fine. That's not a population in revolt. That's a population doing math.

Ad blockers exist, he says. YouTube has been cracking down on them. "No matter how many millions that is, there's many more millions that are not using them."

Here's where I tried to break his model. His case assumes brands are rational actors. I offered the Super Bowl as evidence they are not.

He didn't take the bait. The Super Bowl isn't a performance buy, it's an awareness play. "I challenge anyone to show me the attribution that pinpoints exactly down to a Super Bowl ad that says I gained this much product sales."

And the ad doesn't even have to be good. "Even in some cases we know the ad could be terrible, but everyone will talk about it. And because they talk about it, you won."

Which is how a certain Pepsi ad became one of the best things that ever happened to Coke.

Retail media networks are a roughly $50 billion business. So which is it? Proof consumers accept ads, or proof retailers finally figured out how to sell what they know about you?

"I think it's a little bit of both." Retailers sat on customer data for years without knowing how to monetize it. Retail media gave them a way.

Then he took on the standard knock: Amazon and Walmart eat about 85% of the money, so why is everybody else bothering? He counts well over 200 retail media networks beyond the big two. "This is not a zero-sum game." A specialty retailer's audience isn't Walmart's audience, and brands go where the audience is.

And the shopper? "I don't think people are fooled into thinking that what they're clicking on is not an ad."

Watch the full episode:

Labor is retail's biggest cost. Margins are brutal. So why wouldn't a retailer replace store staff with AI the minute it could?

Because the store is where the money is. By Ricardo's count, somewhere above 80% of retail sales still happen in physical stores, and "people like to buy from people."

Nobody needs a sales associate to pick paper towels. Apparel is different. And here's his best line of the episode, the kind you steal for a board deck:

Ask any store associate and they'll tell you that out of every hundred questions, about 40 are the same easy ones every single time. Give them technology for those 40. "They can spend their time answering the 60 harder questions that customers are asking them that require more thought." And those harder questions, he says, are the ones that turn into sales.

Replace the person entirely and sure, labor costs drop. "Are you gonna win more sales? I claim no, you're not."

Keep reading free with your email: what an AI agent actually does when it shops for you, the toilet paper test for brand loyalty, why your product pages may be invisible to chatbots, and the June prediction that's due right about now.