The Ad Industry's Oldest Trick Still Works

Advertising's relationship with technology follows a script so reliable you could set your watch to it.

A new tool arrives, industry leaders declare it will finally solve the unsolvable. Fraud, brand safety, attention scarcity, the fact that most ads don't work — and money floods in, but three years later everyone knows it didn't work.

Amy Lanzi, who runs Digitas North America, is standing at Cannes Lions saying out loud that AI is the latest entry in this cycle. Not that it's useless, but that it's being sold as the fix for problems that aren't actually technological problems.

When programmatic advertising arrived, skeptics warned that it would just automate fraud at scale — they were correct. When real-time bidding promised to eliminate waste, the same voices warned the promised efficiency would collapse the moment you measured it properly. They were also correct. When blockchain promised to clean up the supply chain, the skepticism was immediate and eventually vindicated.

Every advertising savior technology arrives to solve what can't be solved—not because the solution is impossible, but because the industry profits from selling hope instead of accepting limits.

Lanzi's willingness to say it matters less than the fact that saying it will almost certainly make no difference. She's not wrong — she's just participating in a script that requires everyone to already know that.