059: What is the Future of Advertising?

In today's episode, we discuss the future of advertising, which we define as the 'sale of attention.' People mostly hate ads, but why do they? Is it possible to make ads so well targeted that people actually enjoy the experience? We discuss the remarkably constant amount of advertising as a percent of GDP over a long stretch of history. We ponder the ways accelerating technologies might allow for better metrics and better ad designs in the future, and we wonder whether a large-scale consumer collapse might disrupt advertising's steady growth. Speculating on the future, we imagine that nearly everything that remains scarce in the future might one day be ad-supported.

Om Podcasten

Enter a simulated universe where software beings engage in classic human struggles for belonging, status, and attention, and old certainties like death and gravity are just settings to be negotiated. You can be the god of your own private world, but if find yourself feeling lonely, you might be tempted to give away some of your precious control. This podcast will take you behind the scenes with comic book authors and veteran podcasters Jon Perry (@perryjon) and Ted Kupper (@tedkupper) as they write and develop a science fiction graphic novel called Constellation, set in a metaverse unlike any you’ve seen before: neither a utopia nor a dystopia, neither real nor virtual, it is a simulation where everyone knows they are being simulated and no one much cares, where there’s no hope of leaving and no reason to, just an endless supply of human-designed worlds to create and explore.