For most of its history, advertising thrived on context.
Marlboro could posture as rugged freedom in the pages of Life.
Coca-Cola could sell happiness in the glow of a family television. Brands borrowed gravitas from the stage they performed on.
That stage has collapsed.
Open any feed, and the juxtapositions border on derangement. A luxury perfume ad sits next to footage from kids dyeing a war zone. A “get ready with me” makeup tutorial plays before a video of protesters clashing with police. A parody song about eugenics algorithms trends, while a new snack food launches in the same scroll. Luxury and suffering. Irony and sincerity. Progress and regression. All jostling for the same square of glass.
This is not culture. It is collision.
Algorithms, of course, insist they are solving the problem. They offer “personalization”. But what they actually know are the following: They know when you are restless, when you pause for three seconds on a video, when you hover over a product before abandoning it. They know your pulse. What they do not know is your soul. Why you can’t sleep, why you feel sad, why you are crying.
Prediction is not the same as understanding.
Machines are superb at exploiting moments of weakness—2am insomnia, doomscroll fatigue, payday jitters. Yet they cannot tell you why people yearn, what they aspire to, or what makes life meaningful. The industry has mistaken behavioural prediction for intimacy, and in doing so, has surrendered its one true advantage: the ability to craft enduring meaning.
This is advertising’s awkward dilemma. Do brands add more shards to the pile, fighting for a microsecond of fractured attention? Or do they resist the gravity of the feed and try to create coherence instead?
The uncomfortable truth is that advertising has become a contributor to the breakdown. By chasing “relevance” at all costs, brands pour gasoline on the chaos. Every campaign becomes another dissonant signal fighting for scraps of cognition.
Yet the opportunity is hiding in plain sight. In an environment where everything is noise, coherence becomes radical. In a feed where every signal contradicts the next, a brand that offers consistency, clarity, or even a moment of calm stands out far more than one that shouts louder.
Yesterday’s diagnosis was economic: loyalty is no longer earned, it is rented, renewed only as long as the offer makes sense. Today’s diagnosis is cultural: meaning itself has fragmented.
The future of advertising will not be won by algorithms alone, nor by nostalgia for heritage brands. It will be won by those who can do what machines cannot: give people a story that makes sense of the chaos.
The algorithm may know your pulse, but only humans can write your soul. The question for brands is brutally simple: do you want to feed the collapse—or carve coherence out of it?
