The Market Signal: Meta Seeks "A Redefinition of The Category of Advertising"

The Medium identifies essential signals on how technology is shaping the business of culture, and how the marketplace is evolving in response.

[Author’s Note: I am including a short preview of yesterday’s presentation I recorded exclusively for PARQOR Platinum subscribers. It is an overview of where the media marketplace seems to be headed based on my own research and interviews. At the core of the piece is a concept that both the production and distribution sides of the media business are “flattening”, which I explain in the clip, above.

Upgrade your subscription now to learn more about how “flattening” in production and distribution are playing out in the marketplace in Q2 2025 and beyond.]

The Market Signal

In both Meta’s Q1 2025 earnings call and an interview with Stratechery’s Ben Thompson this week, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg fired warning shots at the industry formerly known as “Madison Avenue”

In the earnings call he offered a refined vision of “redefining what advertising is into an AI agent that delivers measurable business results at scale.”

In his interview with Thompson, Zuckerberg outlined a more aggressive vision: “[I]n general, we’re going to get to a point where you’re a business, you come to us, you tell us what your objective is, you connect to your bank account, you don’t need any creative, you don’t need any targeting demographic, you don’t need any measurement, except to be able to read the results that we spit out.

He noted that“today, advertising is constrained to, ‘All right, I’m buying a billboard or a commercial…’”. However, if we “think about what percent of GDP is advertising today”, Zuckerberg expects that percent will grow.

Why It Matters

The vision emerges six months after we first heard Zuckerberg’s vision that the future of creativity over the internet will be shaped by AI tools meeting the needs of both “hundreds of millions” of small businesses and millions of creators.

However, I noted that small businesses seemed “better suited to capture and monetize scarce consumer attention” these tools. In other words, "small businesses are becoming creators faster than creators are becoming small businesses."

This iteration of Zuckerberg’s vision differs in that it nakedly admits its ambitions as both disruptive and formative. He told both investors and Thompson that “increased productivity from AI will make advertising a meaningfully larger share of global GDP than it is today.”

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The Medium identifies essential signals on how technology is shaping the business of culture, and how the marketplace is evolving in response.

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