Marketers Will Need to Rethink the Role of Digital Platforms
What if it was never going to last?
More than three decades have passed since the first banner ad appeared on a website. Digital wasn’t just a new frontier, it was a place that experienced stratospheric year-over-year growth—and the unspoken expectation was that growth would continue forever.
That expectation makes sense when you consider how the web became a bigger part of our lives; with every passing year, millions more people got online. As the number of connected swelled, it only seemed logical that digital advertising would continue to expand.
But then, things changed. It’s hard to put an exact date on precisely when the mood shifted. Was it when the digital ad market largely coalesced around a handful of super-giant tech companies? Was it when privacy legislation and consumer attitudes changed, and the practices that were once routine became verboten? Or was it when the strategies that once delivered results started to disappoint?
Like any complex situation, the answer to the question is a combination of all those things, plus several others I couldn’t mention within the confines of an introduction. The point is, the ad industry is desperate. It has no new ideas, and no magic tricks up its sleeve.
The missing impact
If you search for the term “declining efficacy of online ads,” you will come across an article from 2024 warning about how Google Ads no longer deliver the performance they once did. Elsewhere in the results, a 2023 op-ed declares, “Digital advertising is dead. Good riddance.” I spotted another article from 2022 making the same case, as well as a blog from the World Federation of Advertisers outlining ways of “reversing the decline in advertising effectiveness.“
And that is before we get to the mountains of anecdotal data from sites like Reddit and Twitter, where marketers bemoan the increasingly ineffectual platforms that swallow their budgets without driving conversions. “Google has finally lost it. $694 for one unidentified click today,” screams one post from late 2024. Another post asks, “Just how much of a scam are Google Ads???,” citing one conversion over a six-month period when the company spent $3,000.
