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My phone must be listening to my conversations, right?
How else would I get an ad for a stainless steel sustainable toothbrush just an hour after talking about one with a friend? We have all asked ourselves this question. The answer, it turns out, is no. Advertising has simply gotten so incredibly good at using behavioral, geographical, and personal data that it doesn't need to listen to you to figure out what you might be thinking about buying (this article explains how).
So if our phones aren’t listening, what is happening? A very brief history of Western marketing: the 19th-century Industrial Revolution created a sudden need for companies to sell goods at scale, prompting a wave of newspaper ads and billboard campaigns. The arrival of radio in the 1920s allowed brands to reach millions of customers simultaneously, while television in the 1950s added a powerful visual dimension. Then came the Internet in the 1990s, which radically transformed the landscape by enabling direct communication via email, granular customer segmentation, and web analytics. The subsequent rise of social media opened the door to two-way dialogue between brands and their audiences, and gave birth to influencer marketing. And now, marketing automation and AI are taking personalization and targeting to unprecedented levels.
Digital advertising is a massive, sophisticated market worth $740.4 billion in 2026, and it shapes our online experiences in ways we barely notice anymore. Ads follow us while we research on our browsers, scroll through social media, watch YouTube videos, read the news, and listen to podcasts. A flow of sponsored results, unskippable 20-second videos, unsolicited jingles, and insistent calls-to-action. The implicit bargain is that digital advertising gives us access to content and services for free, in exchange for a little — or a lot — of our attention.
As a marketer, I spend a lot of time thinking about this professionally. What strikes me though is how often the topic has come up in recent conversations with people who are about as far from the industry as you can get. That's because the advertising world is undergoing a big change, with ads creeping into spaces we never expected to find them — on your refrigerator screen, in your Uber app while you wait for your ride, and very soon, inside your conversations with AI chatbots such as ChatGPT. The generation of creative assets and texts with AI has shortened the time required to push ads live, reducing the barrier to entry and with it — in many cases — the quality.
Advertising also takes subtler forms, though no less pervasive ones. Product placement in movies and TV shows has become so prominent that series like Netflix's Nobody Wants This and films like Challengers have drawn criticism for turning entire scenes into extended commercials. Sometimes, though, the effect is unplanned: sales of Eggo frozen waffles rose 14% in 2017 and 9.4% in 2018 after the brand appeared organically in Stranger Things — without any formal deal with the show.
Next time an eerily well-timed ad stops you mid-scroll, you'll know it was the result of a system that has been quietly learning you for years and has found an increased amount of channels to reach you. With this edition, I wanted to take a moment to step back and look into it, so that we can all be a little more aware of what it means for how we think, choose, and form preferences.
Have you also noticed this shift?
Sanjna
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