WARC’sThe Future of Programmatic 2025 is a meticulously composed document. The charts are polished. The language is neutral. The predictions are framed as progress.
But read it closely and a deeper truth emerges: It’s not a report. It’s an autopsy. What’s dying is unpredictability. Creativity. Humanity. And we’re all expected to applaud as the corpse is carried off, sanitized and smiling.
We Are Optimizing Ourselves Into Irrelevance
Every year, programmatic becomes more “efficient.” More “targeted.” More “brand safe.” And with each incremental improvement, something irreplaceable is lost.
We’ve mistaken precision for persuasion. We’ve traded emotional impact for mechanical relevance. We’ve built a system that serves the spreadsheet, not the soul.
We didn’t refine advertising. We tamed it. And in doing so, we made it forgettable.
Curation Is Not a Strategy. It’s a Symptom.
Let’s stop pretending curation is innovation. It’s not. It’s fear management. It’s an escape hatch from a system that got too messy. We created an open marketplace—then panicked when it did what open things do: surprise us.
So we closed it.
We built private marketplaces, multi-publisher deals, curated “quality” impressions. And we congratulated ourselves for regaining control. But in truth, we just shrank the canvas. The reach is cleaner, sure. But the resonance is gone.
Personalization Has Become a Prison
We’re shown what the machine thinks we want—again and again—until novelty disappears. We call it relevance, but what it really is… is confinement. When every ad is customized to our past behavior, we stop growing. We stop discovering. We become static reflections of data points.
We aren’t advertising to humans anymore. We’re advertising to ghosts of their former selves.
AI Isn’t Making Ads Safer. It’s Making Them Invisible.
The report praises AI for enhancing brand safety. But here’s the problem no one wants to name: AI doesn’t understand context. It understands keywords, sentiment scores, and statistical tone. So entire stories, entire voices, entire truths are algorithmically scrubbed out—because the machine can’t read between the lines.
It’s not safety. It’s sanitization. It’s censorship with a dashboard.
It’s flawed. It’s physical. It’s not entirely measurable. And because of that—it still has soul.
It reminds us that real advertising doesn’t beg for clicks. It stops you mid-step. It lingers in your head hours later, uninvited.
The Real Threat Isn’t Bad Ads. It’s Forgettable Ones.
We keep polishing the system, but forget why the system existed in the first place. Advertising isn’t a math problem. It’s a cultural force. A punchline. A provocation. A seduction. A story. And we’ve allowed it to become… efficient.
That should terrify us.
Because efficient ads don’t change minds. Efficient ads don’t start movements. Efficient ads don’t get remembered.
Only real ones do. Messy. Emotional. Imperfect. Human.
In Case You Skimmed, Read This:
Curation isn’t strategy. It’s shrinkage.
AI brand safety is quiet censorship.
Personalization killed surprise.
The future of programmatic isn’t what’s next—it’s what’s left.
We didn’t lose the plot. We wrote it out of the story. Stay Curious
We are told that “peace” is being negotiated. Cameras flash, leaders shake hands, headlines sigh in relief. But listen more closely: the word “peace” here has been hollowed out. What is being offered is not an end to war but a linguistic trick—territory traded under the table, sovereignty redefined as bargaining chips. It is settlement for some, surrender for others, dressed up as salvation for all.
This isn’t new. Europe has heard this music before. In 1938, the word was “appeasement.” Leaders congratulated themselves for buying peace by abandoning those caught in the path of aggression. What followed was not peace but the validation of violence, the confirmation that might could dictate borders. Every time we accept aggression as fait accompli, we do not prevent the next war—we finance it.
What’s unfolding now is not a “peace process” but the laundering of defeat. The aggressor demands recognition for his spoils. The mediator smiles, relieved to notch a diplomatic “win.” And the victim is told, once again, to swallow the loss for the greater good.
If sovereignty can be traded away without the consent of the sovereign, then the word itself becomes meaningless. If peace means rewarding the invader and isolating the invaded, then peace becomes indistinguishable from surrender. And if Europe accepts this language, it will be complicit in rewriting the postwar order into something unrecognizable: a world where borders are drawn not by law or consent, but by force and fatigue.
We stand at a rhetorical crossroads. One path leads to an honest settlement—messy, difficult, but grounded in consent and legitimacy. The other path leads to surrender disguised as peace, a mask that fools no one but comforts the powerful.
The question is simple. When the mask slips—and it always does—will we admit that we knew all along what we were watching? Or will we pretend we were deceived, when the truth was staring at us from the first handshake
Human-AI relationships are no longer just science fiction. OpenAI’s launch of ChatGPT in 2022 ushered in a new era of artificial intelligence chatbots from companies like Nomi, Character AI and Replika, and tech titans like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk are touting chatbots on their platforms. The AI companions have proven to be smart, quick-witted, argumentative, helpful and sometimes aggressively romantic. While some people are falling in love with the AI companions, others are building deep friendships. The speedy development of AI chatbots presents a mountain of ethical and safety concerns that experts say will only intensify once AI begins to train itself. The societal debate surrounding AI companions isn’t just about their effects on humans. Increasingly it’s about whether the companions can have human-like experiences. In this documentary, CNBC’s Salvador Rodriguez traveled across the U.S. to interview people who’ve formed emotional relationships with AI and met the founders of chatbot companies to explore the good, the bad and the unknown, and to find out how AI is changing relationships as we know them.
