Today’s headlines are dominated by AI, and rightfully so. Are machines the new gods or the greatest bubble in history? Either way, this wave of AI will define a course for humanity. 

But for all the talk about AI, we’ve spent far too little time talking about the business model that led us here: advertising. This is the story told in my new book, Human Dot AI. 

If “advertising” sounds too boring, think of it instead as the business of shaping human opinion at global scale—the attention economy. Advertising is the business model that underlies many of the largest tech companies in the world and shapes the information diet of billions of people. 

But all of this only matters in the context of what comes next in a world with generative AI. How will news and entertainment change? What skills will we all need when we can talk to machines, and they can talk back to us?

Advertising has an important role to play in the generational technology shift that is upon us, and those of us in the business have a responsibility to make sure advertising doesn’t misalign AI with human interests. 

Human Dot AI tells three stories:

• How our current media diet, and the world we know, was shaped by machines (early AI) seeking advertising.
• How being good at being human, and connecting with other humans, has always mattered most and will only matter more in the age of AI. 
• What comes next in a world of generative AI and how the business model of advertising (the fight for our attention) will shape human lives as well as the future of the most important technology ever created.

I’m sharing an excerpt from the introduction of Human Dot AI below to illustrate how different—and in some ways, very familiar—the attention economy looked when I was just starting out in the advertising business. 

Human Dot AI will be published Nov. 10 by Amplify Publishing Group. Preorder your copy here. 

The Business of Attention

2019, Tokyo, 5 a.m. I was pacing around the pool of the Park Hyatt, the hotel immortalized in Lost in Translation, the film in which Bill Murray plays a world-weary actor summoned to Japan to film a Suntory whiskey commercial. With the neon lights of the city blinking forty-seven floors beneath me, incredibly loopy from the jet lag, I was suspended in time. And for the second time in my life, I was fired by a mouse.

I’d been expecting the call from Disney HR. It had been on the calendar for months. I’d always loved climbing—trees, mountains, buildings (if my Tokyo setting was any indication), and jobs. And now I was going to fall, or at least take the express elevator down.

I was leading an organization that was responsible for multiple billions of dollars in advertising for sports, broadcast, and cable television at Fox Networks Group, one of the world’s most powerful media empires. Think, The Simpsons, American Idol, Modern Family, and every major sports league imaginable. I’d been on the field at the World Series and the Super Bowl, hosted parties from Las Vegas to the south of France with actors, National Geographic Explorers, and WWE wrestlers.

It was everything I’d never even dreamed of since I dropped out of business school and moved to the West Coast without a career plan over two decades ago.

The network advertising chiefs (what they call the head of ad revenue at the major TV networks) had long held the most powerful jobs in media and advertising. They were rainmakers and ringleaders. They helped shape the ad spending of the world’s largest companies and weave their messages into content people love. They connected marketers with the Hollywood storytellers who offer the opportunity to reach many millions of viewers during their favorite programming in order to hopefully persuade them to buy a new Ford or Toyota, trust Aflac or State Farm with their home or car insurance, reach for Irish Spring or Dove soap in the shower, kick back with a Budweiser or Heineken.

For years, network advertising chief was the biggest job in all advertising. But by the time I got to Fox, the ground was shifting. Networks were consolidating, and TV advertising was shrinking as viewers were opting out of the traditional TV experience. My remit as president of advertising at Fox Networks Group, at least as I described it, was to make the advertising “suck less.” And with a true Quixote-like effort, I tried to do just that right up until Disney acquired (most of) Fox.

When I finally got the call from Disney HR, it confirmed what had long ago been decided: I wasn’t going to become a “cast member” (a.k.a. Disney employee). But that morning in Tokyo, all I could think about was how few people could say they’d been fired twice by mouse-centric companies.

The first time it happened, I was working at Chuck E. Cheese in Latham, New York. I was seventeen years old and, despite the perpetual sweat smell, I actually enjoyed running around in the mouse costume and entertaining kids. And if I am being honest, the real reason I applied there was to get the title of assistant manager.

Considering all the free pizza, getting excellent at Pop-A-Shot (but not Skee-Ball, no matter how many times I played), and the fact that there was always some low stakes human drama to triage, it was everything you could ask for in a high school job: seniority at seventeen and perks galore.

One time, the employee in the Chuck E. outfit was running through the main room and tripped and fell. The giant mouse head came off and rolled across the dining room. Birthday parties watched with various levels of horror or amusement. There were a lot of free pizza and prizes given that day. I loved solving people-problems and dealing with eccentric personalities, and the Latham (that’s actual upstate New York, near Albany) Chuck E. Cheese was never short on either.

But when summer rolled around, I made more money on weekends lifeguarding. So, when I wouldn’t change my schedule, a company whose whole brand identity was a grinning, wise-cracking, anthropomorphic mouse parted ways with me, and not for the last time, it would turn out.

Chuck E. Cheese (Charles Entertainment Cheese, if you’re feeling formal) really brought together all the things I would later come to love: hospitality, iconic IP, entertainment, and games. The term “experiential” hadn’t yet entered my lexicon, but that’s exactly what I loved—live, immersive entertainment that engages people in a way technology has yet to replicate. I didn’t realize it at the time, but the manic energy of Chuck E. Cheese—the unlimited soft drinks and pizza and loud music and video games—was a perfect metaphor for today’s entertainment-centric world of infinite distractions.

The difference is that, at Chuck E. Cheese, the chaos was shared and physical. You were elbow-to-elbow with other people, feeding sticky tokens into machines, celebrating wins together. Today we experience that same sensory overload virtually and alone, our attention splintered by endless notifications and algorithmically generated content, isolated behind screens that promise connection but deliver only the simulation of it.

Attention is the world’s, and every individual’s, most valuable resource, influencing our lives and the planet in ways we’re just beginning to understand. Attention may be finite, but what it can be converted into is not. It shapes everything—not just what we watch and the products we buy—but who we date, whether we marry, the movements we join, the causes we fight for, and even where we worship and how we die.

This idea has shaped my career in media and advertising (theoretically the market for buying and selling attention), giving me a front-row seat to the modern attention wars—how they’ve been won and lost and how they’ve transformed our world over the last twenty-five years.

Today, an astonishing percentage of the global economy—trillions upon trillions of dollars in market valuation—is built on top of algorithms competing to attract, harvest, and monetize attention. Once viewed as the business of brand awareness, a marketing expense, advertising is now the invisible infrastructure of the entire global economy.

On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, I stood on Hudson Street watching in shock as WTC 1 fell.

That image is seared into my brain.

In the days and years that followed, the future of New York City’s Financial District seemed bleak. Nobody would want to go back there, the thinking went. The wound was too deep.

There was an open scar in the middle of the city, a 16-acre void we called “the pit,” spanned by temporary pedestrian bridges. For a long time, it felt like nothing could rise from it.

But then, the steel started to climb. One World Trade finally broke street level and inched toward the skyline. Over the course of a decade, New York City did what it does best: move forward without forgetting.

In 2013, WPP took a chance. Our global media collective GroupM—now called WPP Media—signed one of the first long-term leases at 3 World Trade Center, at the time the largest new office commitment in a World Trade Center building. It was an investment in a vision that Larry Silverstein, who led redevelopment of the site, and Mayor Michael Bloomberg were determined to see come to fruition.

Other corporations including Condé Nast, Spotify, and Fast Company also came to plant their flags downtown. 

With them came restaurants, young residents, culture—an organic gravitational pull. Lower Manhattan’s population has doubled since 2000, according to the New York State Comptroller, and the Financial District saw the biggest rise in apartment searches of any neighborhood across the five boroughs in 2025 on StreetEasy.

I often think about what it means to work at the World Trade Center.

I pass the memorial pools on my way to the office every morning, where families and tourists stand in reflection. The Oculus is visible from my office window, and to enter it is to stand inside the ribs of something ancient and alive—a daily reminder of where I am.

In our industry, it’s easy to get caught up in the stress of the job. But then the weight of what happened here hits, a reminder to not take a single day for granted.

I also think of this place as the embodiment of resilience, powered by creativity.

Architects, developers, and city planners had to rebuild Lower Manhattan to honor the lives lost, while empowering a community to feel hopeful about the future. Creativity is the ultimate act of optimism. Imagination, collaboration, design, are gestures toward tomorrow. 

Lower Manhattan is a living, breathing tribute where people work, create, and live every single day. A place forever anchored by remembrance, yet surrounded by hope.

We are living through a historical paradox when it comes to human connection. Right now we are connected to more people than any humans who have ever lived. At the same time, many of us report having never felt more alone.

Social media sits at the center of that paradox. It has transformed how we meet the world, reshaping commerce, culture and human connection.

My mom sees that paradox from the other side of the screen. She is the director of trauma training at McLean Hospital just outside of Boston and, as all moms do, gives me a wiser perspective. Every day, she sees adolescents come in seeking help, witnessing firsthand how technologies built to connect us have the potential to instead deepen loneliness.

To understand why this is happening and the adaptive approaches marketers can take to help change the social media experience, we need look no further than our closest relatives in the animal kingdom.

British biological anthropologist Robin Dunbar noticed something simple: Primates spend much of their day tending one another’s fur. Across primate species, time spent on the ritual rose with group size. Primates, he argued, build community through physical touch.

Researchers on Berkeley neurobiologist Doris Tsao’s team showed macaques various images while scanning their brains, and found six small areas that lit up far more for faces than any other images. This research led to the insight that we are not creatures who happen to like faces—our brains have specific regions just for processing them. Every face on a thumbnail image taps hardware that evolved millions of years before the iPhone. 

Emory University researchers Sarah Brosnan and the late Frans de Waal asked capuchins to exchange tokens for food. A monkey given a cucumber after seeing another receive a tastier, preferred grape sometimes threw the cucumber back.

Now think about your social feed. We call it a feed for a reason: Too often, it fuels the part of us that keeps score. Every viral takedown, every “you deserve this” campaign trades on an ancient ache for that which we do not have. For all our sophistication, we are still marketing to capuchins with credit cards.

The pull of connection, the obsession with faces, the sting of comparison—these studies show traits that live inside all of us, embedded more deeply than we realize. 

But there is one more study that my mom and I keep returning to. A study that gives us hope. The same researcher, Frans de Waal—who was one of my professors at Emory—documented what happens after a chimpanzee conflict. Sometimes, an uninvolved chimp approaches and embraces the loser and offers comfort through physical touch. Vulnerability was the permission structure for connection.

Each of these primate truths shows up in our work as marketers. They offer a choice about which human instincts our work rewards.

Dunbar’s work suggests that connection does not scale automatically; it costs attention. Our industry measures reach. The troop measured touch. A million impressions cannot replace what combing gave the troop: small, consistent, intimate moments of recognition and bonding. 

Our sensitivity to faces explains why a creator with a face often beats a brand with a logo, and why the faces in our work can matter more than their production value. 

The capuchin study shows how comparison and outrage are among the easiest engagement mechanisms to engineer. But that also makes them the costliest, driving numbers while eroding the relationship. And they do it by activating resentment—not the right foundation for building a brand anyone loves.

Vulnerability turns out to be the playbook for the marketing work I am most proud of. The campaigns that actually move people, the ones that build community rather than impressions, all have a version of consolation, of naked vulnerability within them. And through that leap, they access a deeper form of human connection.

The marketing industry has an important role to play. Our work reaches billions of humans every day, across sight, sound, and motion. The brands that win the next decade will be the ones that understand their audience on the deepest level, knowing not only to whom they speak, but how those audiences evolved to be human in the first place.

Written with contributions from Dr. Cynthia Kaplan, director of trauma training and consultation at McLean Hospital, assistant professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School, and, most importantly, his mom.

I spend a lot of time with marketing leaders who, on paper, are doing personalization right. With experienced staff, robust data sets, and strategic campaigns, they should be influencing profitable growth.

Instead, they’re seeing wasted marketing spend, minimal momentum, and disjointed customer experiences. They may be personalizing, but it’s lacking relevance. 

Relevance means the message, design, and channel not only make technical sense, but they actually “land” with the target audience. 

The precision gap

The core difference between personalization and relevance is the question they answer: Personalization is the result of solving for “Who is this person?” Relevance forces marketers to ask themselves a tougher one: “What should we do right now? And what happens if we don’t?”

This is where I’m seeing many brands struggling. They often send more messages—or focus on further refining their segments—in an attempt to improve outcomes. But it doesn’t work. 

The real solution requires a connected system that combines identity, customer behavior, and business signals. This foundation and context allow marketers to see intent early, decide what will be effective in that moment, and act before that window of opportunity closes.

What relevance actually requires

Peeling back marketing buzzwords, the core of relevance is:

1. Who are you talking to? Brands need a clear and consistent understanding of who their audience is. I’m not talking about basic personas or segments, but strong identity resolution. If your customer data is fragmented across different databases and platforms, the experience will fracture. 

For example, the dreaded email promoting running shoes that the customer already bought. This often happens because browsing, purchase, and loyalty data are disconnected. It may feel like a technology problem internally, but externally, it feels like an irrelevant and frustrating experience.

2. What matters most? Signals are highly valuable for relevant marketing, but not every click, scroll, search, or site visit implies intent. Brands need to parse the signals to separate meaningful actions from low-value activity. 

For example, a customer who clicks on one winter coat in October has much different intent than someone who reviews sizing guides, checks inventory on different styles, colors, and brands, and adds one to their cart. Distinguishing between passive interest and purchase intent (and being able to respond accordingly), is the key to success.

3. What do you do next? Brands have to be able to act on high-intent signals quickly. Even the strongest signals lose value if they sit in dashboards or require human hours to identify. Timing is an important part of the relevance conversation, and the window of influence is much smaller than anticipated.

For example, if a shopper abandons a cart and doesn’t get a relevant follow-up until a few days later, you’ve likely lost that customer to a competitor. 

Relevance is the personalization multiplier

Moving toward relevance requires intention. Start by focusing on the data and signals that can create measurable value. If something doesn’t have a direct impact on action, it probably doesn’t belong at the center of your strategy. 

This might require you to get comfortable pulling back. Not every signal or moment needs a responding message. Knowing when not to engage is part of building trust with customers and ensuring they have a positive experience.

And above all, make sure these decisions connect across the lifecycle. Messages should build on each other, not compete for attention.

This may require a review of your tech stack. Relevance depends on a connected system of intelligence that brings data and context together, not a patchwork of disparate tools. 

The brands that outperform are the ones that offer the most relevant experience.

If you want to dive deeper into how CMOs are navigating the shift to relevance, check out The CMO’s New Mandate: Proving Marketing’s Impact in the Age of AI.

During the week I spent at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, one thing stood out: creativity goes way beyond the Palais—from the beach and the villas to every block of the waterfront. 

This year, it was impossible to walk past Salesforce Beach, the Journal House, or the DoorDash activation without stopping. It proves how the festival has become something bigger than anyone originally imagined.

It’s time we talked about what that means.

Cannes Lions started as an awards festival for the advertising industry to celebrate craft and creative excellence. That’s still true and valuable, but something shifted. 

When the festival introduced The Brand Experience and Activation Lions, it showed that experiential is a legitimate creative discipline and not just a budget line item. Then brands started showing up differently: they built temporary campuses, hosted executive summits, launched products, created content, and most of all, deepened relationships.

Cannes has transformed into one of the world’s most powerful B2B experiential marketing platforms. More than 12,000 delegates, the most important marketing conversations, and decision-makers who are accessible in ways they aren’t the other 51 weeks of the year. That transformation tells us brands already know the ROI of live experience.

Event industry leader David Adler previously posted on LinkedIn that “the events world built Cannes Lions.” He’s right. 

The experiences drawing the crowds, generating the content, and sparking the conversations that end up in everyone’s LinkedIn feeds are the creative work of this moment. They are the result of strategic thinking, creativity, and world-class execution which the experiential agencies designing and producing are making possible.

Brands should think past award recognition and focus on presence and ownership 

If experiential has become the dominant creative expression at one of the world’s most important marketing platforms, then the brands and agencies driving that work need to recognize what they’ve built and show up accordingly. 

Brands come to Cannes with vision and investment to make something memorable. The experiential agencies turning that vision into reality are strategic partners in that work, not vendors executing a brief. 

The brand brings the story and the agency brings it to life in three dimensions and in real time. That partnership is what produces the moments Cannes is known for.

The events industry has experienced Cannes as something that happens around us, rather than something we helped create. The festival’s evolution from awards show to global experiential platform was driven by brands and their agency partners who understood that the most powerful marketing doesn’t live on a screen—it lives in a room, on a beach, in a moment that people carry with them long after they leave.

Cannes Lions needs to continue to expand its definition of creativity to reflect where the creative energy is flowing and the events industry should be showing up not as guests, but as architects.