N° 017Planted 2026

Note · found

Ad Reads vs. Produced Commercials

From my partner Victoria on 2025-05-26:

Ad reads feel intimate and familiar, commercial feels cheap and tacky and mass produced

See also: Clive Thompson on Rewilding your attention

Ali Montag in The Inner Ring of the Internet, quoting Vox’s Rebecca Jennings:

What we’re seeing is the lowest common denominator of what human beings want to look at, appealing to our most base impulses... The result is, well, mediocre.

Questions

  • What does that say about the state of advertising in media (esp. podcasts)?
  • Is the source of a recommendation more important than the content of the rec?
  • Are trusted sources becoming more important than The Algorithm™?

Paths from here

  • Agency: choosing whose voices get your attention
  • The Now and the Not Now: ads at the gas pump, and triaging attention
  • Goodhart’s Law: what The Algorithm™ is optimizing for