Why Advertising Will Be Key to Shaping Our AI-Powered Future—For Better or Worse

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.