Shopper AIs are here. Who do you advertise to when humans don't shop any more?
Proof-of-concept AIs are already appearing that presage monumental changes in how consumers shop and buy. This has massive implications for online advertising.
Filed under: AI and consumer behavior
For a few weeks, I have been drafting a Substack post explaining why consumer behavior is about to radically change because of AI. Finding time to finish the post has been tough.
But this afternoon I posted a tweet thread that serves as a “preview” of that post. I am embedding that thread here.
My thread was in reaction to a tweet by Harley Finkelstein, President of Shopify:
The future of how people buy
This was my reaction:
Advertising will never be the same again (again)
That was it for my short tweet thread, but I’ll add the following:
My point (or prediction) is not that AI will cause advertising to cease to exist, but that advertising will change. This change will likely be quite painful.
Billions and billions of dollars of ad revenue and media planning are currently predicated on a particular set of consumer behaviors that only date back about 25 years: people navigating around websites and apps; reading, typing, and clicking. In fact, we do so much fussing over sites, apps, and devices that the average American is living a 32-hour day when you account for multitasking.
Until now, consumers’ frenetic behavior in the digital sphere has been a great boon to the media and ad world, as it has meant an ever-growing pool of valuable consumer attention to be monetized.
However, consumer behavior is about to change, and so too will advertising.
More to come on this in a future post.