Why uncertainty is digital advertising's next management challenge.
Successful markets have a habit of optimizing themselves into a corner.
For more than two decades, digital advertising has gotten faster, more automated, and dramatically more efficient. From programmatic buying to real-time decisioning to sophisticated optimization, the AdTech industry has built one of the most advanced marketplaces in the world.
That's a huge achievement, and therefore, it also created our next problem. The systems AdTech has built are incredible at moving advertising at global scale. They're considerably less good at showing any one participant everything moving through them. The technology has been streamlined to a fault.
Jeff Beer recently described one consequence of this shift in Fast Company, framing it as the "Suspicion Economy." He describes a world where people increasingly assume what they encounter online has been engineered to capture attention rather than earn trust.
That creates a strange problem for brands. The pipes have gotten incredibly good at engineering attention, but that attention has come at the expense of the companies using those pipes to build trust. The infrastructure has optimized for one outcome while undermining another.
You can see that suspicion everywhere. "I swear my phone is listening to me." "How did that site know to show me that ad?" "Why is this story suddenly all over my feed?"
Whether those assumptions are true is almost beside the point. It doesn't really matter who "they" are. It doesn’t matter what is or isn’t tracked. It matters that people increasingly sense someone is putting their fingers on the scale.
I think that's a symptom of something bigger.
The same interconnected systems that create tremendous efficiency make it harder to understand how information, decisions, and exposure move through them. The market isn't intentionally broken. It's complicated, and complexity without visibility guarantees uncertainty.
This is why I don't think automation is the problem. Automation made today's advertising ecosystem possible. The question is: have we automated the right things, and have we invested enough in understanding the complexity that automation created?
Other industries have faced versions of this. Finance and Cyber Security especially. They didn't become more resilient by abandoning innovation or eliminating complexity. They learned that resilience had to become a competitive advantage alongside efficiency. Digital advertising is at the same point.
For years, digital advertising measured success through impressions, reach, conversions, and return on investment. Those metrics still matter. But there's a lot happening between them that a performance dashboard doesn't show you.
Where did the ad come from? Who touched it along the way? Does the ad have risk? Who turned a blind eye if it does? Who is profiting? Who ultimately absorbs the risk and is imposed the cost?
These are security questions but they are also operational and governance questions. They’re also increasingly leadership questions. Risk is not objective.
At Confiant, we put security incidents, deceptive experiences, poor-quality ads, policy violations, and operational failures into separate buckets because they have different causes and require different responses.
But from the perspective of the business trafficking them, they're all forms of advertising risk. A malicious redirect is not the same thing as an auto-expand ad, but both can ultimately hurt everyone in the value chain, even as it pays some of them.
That's what makes the Suspicion Economy an operational warning for the advertising economy.
When the systems connecting businesses and customers become too difficult to track, confidence is undermined. The answer isn't less automation or less innovation. It's getting better at understanding, managing and mitigating the risk we're carrying inside the systems we've built.
We spent two decades getting incredibly good at optimizing digital advertising. The next challenge is getting equally good at managing the risk that optimization created.