In this episode of the podcast, I argue that the total automation of digital advertising through AI enablement presents a radically economically expansive opportunity that, while certainly disruptive for certain segments of the digital advertising ecosystem, will ultimately confer significant benefits on consumers, advertisers, and advertising platforms alike.

I term the complete, end-to-end automation of digital advertising Commerce at the limit: it represents not just the utmost optimization of advertisers' campaigns, but also the introduction of every business that could potentially derive value from it to the digital advertising economy. Commerce at the limit captures the maximum theoretical scale of advertising's impact of the economy: the AI-empowered apogee of digital commerce.

Thanks to the sponsors of this week’s episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast:

• INCRMNTAL⁠⁠. True attribution measures incrementality, always on.
• ContextSDK. ContextSDK uses over 200 smartphone signals to detect a user’s real-world context, allowing apps to deliver perfectly timed push notifications and in-app offers.

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Resources cited in this podcast:

• What comes next after Facebook’s VO campaign strategy? (Mobile Dev Memo)
• Understanding Google’s Universal App Campaign (UAC) changes (Mobile Dev Memo)
• Understanding conversion optimization in digital advertising (Mobile Dev Memo)
• “Black box” ad optimization and satisficer’s remorse (Mobile Dev Memo)
• The inflationary impact of AI-generated ad creative (Mobile Dev Memo)
• Ad Spend Forecast To Grow By 4.9% In 2025, Despite A Reduced Economic Outlook (Dentsu)
• Measuring the digital economy (IAB)
• The Rise of Digital Advertising and Its Economic Implications (St. Louis Fed)
• 2024 digital ad spend and video strategy report (IAB)
• What will it take for CTV ad spend to overtake linear? (The Drum)
• Digital Video Is Set to Capture Nearly 60% of All TV/Video Ad Spend in 2025, CTV Rebounds to Double-Digit Growth in 2024, According to IAB (IAB)
• ‘You Will’: A Macroeconomic Analysis of Digital Advertising
• The Expansion of Varieties in the New Age of Advertising
• Targeted Advertising, Market Structure, and Consumer Welfare
• Estimating the Value of Offsite Data to Advertisers on Meta
• Evaluating the Impact of Privacy Regulation on E-Commerce Firms: Evidence from Apple's App Tracking Transparency
• The App Tracking Transparency recession (Mobile Dev Memo)
• Mobile Gaming in 2023: Still Cooling Down After a Red-Hot Run, the $107B Category Wasn’t Without Success Stories (Sensor Tower)