The Future of Media Is Not More Advertising. It Is Smarter Advertising
The media industry has never lacked technology. If anything, we have spent the last decade adding more of it: more platforms, more data, more dashboards, more targeting options and more ways to buy media. But more technology does not automatically create a better media ecosystem. I believe the next phase of our industry will be defined by something different: simplicity, intelligence and creativity. Technology should increasingly disappear into the background, enabling marketers to spend less time managing systems and more time creating meaningful connections between brands and people. Digital audio is one of the clearest examples of this opportunity. Audio has always had a unique quality within media: it is personal, emotional and often consumed during moments when other media cannot reach people, whether we are driving, exercising, commuting, cooking or simply relaxing. At the same time, listening behaviour has fundamentally changed. Traditional radio has been joined by streaming audio, digital radio and an enormous podcast ecosystem, creating an incredibly powerful but also increasingly fragmented landscape.
For advertisers, that fragmentation creates both an opportunity and a problem. Digital audio can combine the emotional power and reach of traditional radio with the precision, flexibility and measurability of digital advertising, but accessing that potential should not require advertisers to understand dozens of technologies, integrations and marketplaces. That belief was one of the reasons we created adpaq. Our ambition was not simply to build another advertising platform; we wanted to remove complexity from digital audio and create one environment where agencies and advertisers could plan, buy, optimize and create campaigns. Today, we bring together streaming audio, online radio and podcasts while combining programmatic buying with data, real-time optimization and AI-powered creative capabilities. For me, however, the technology itself is not the real innovation. Making sophisticated technology simple enough that people actually want to use it is where innovation becomes valuable.
Artificial intelligence will accelerate this development enormously. Much of today’s conversation around AI in media focuses on generative AI: creating copy, images, video or audio faster. That is important, and we already use AI to make audio creative production faster and more accessible, but I believe this is only the beginning. The next major development will be agentic advertising, where AI does not simply suggest what a marketer could do but can actually execute parts of the process. We have already started exploring this at adpaq by enabling AI assistants to interact directly with our advertising technology. Imagine a marketer simply saying: “Create an audio campaign targeting young families around these locations, use these budget parameters, develop several relevant creative variations and optimize towards the best-performing audiences.” Increasingly, technology will be capable of translating such an objective into actual campaign actions. This does not make media professionals less relevant. Quite the opposite: if technology can take care of repetitive operational work, people can focus on the areas where human intelligence creates the greatest value — strategy, creativity, relationships and judgement.
There is also an important responsibility that comes with this shift. More automation should never mean less transparency or less control. As AI systems move from providing recommendations to actually taking actions, the industry needs clear boundaries around what technology can and cannot do autonomously. Informational and repetitive tasks can increasingly be automated, while sensitive actions involving budgets, strategy or major campaign decisions should remain transparent and, where appropriate, require human approval. I therefore do not believe the winners of AI-powered advertising will necessarily be the companies that automate everything. They will be the companies that find the right balance between automation and control. Building adpaq has reinforced something I have believed throughout my career in media: the best innovation does not make things more complicated; it removes friction. It connects fragmented markets, makes powerful technology accessible and allows people to spend their time where they can make the biggest difference.
I believe we are entering one of the most exciting periods the media industry has experienced. AI will dramatically lower the operational barriers to advertising, programmatic technology will continue to make media more addressable and measurable, creative production will become faster and increasingly dynamic, and AI agents will begin managing parts of the media workflow that today require many manual steps. But the objective should never simply be to create more advertising. It should be to create better advertising: more relevant, more creative, more measurable and ultimately more valuable to both advertisers and audiences. Technology should enable that future without becoming the centre of it. Because regardless of how sophisticated our platforms become, media will always be about something fundamentally human: finding the right story, for the right person, at the right moment.