<i>Advertising doesn&#x27;t have to suck. We can tell great stories with digital.</i><p>Imagine if you&#x27;d seen an article about Shaq being a giant, and it only had ONE ad for mayonnaise instead of 38. Imagine all the great stories Folgers Mayonnaise (or whoever) could have told!<p>I claim (with no evidence) that you can&#x27;t tell great stories about mayonnaise with digital, or with anything. I claim similarly that people <i>don&#x27;t want to see or read great stories about mayonnaise</i>.<p>Sure, you can interrupt a TV show and put a mayonnaise advert there, where a roughly-captive audience will see it, you can put an advert by a road or on a building, where people can&#x27;t reasonably avoid it, and from that there will be more recognition of some brands than others. Within the context of a TV ad which is going to exist, there are better and worse adverts, and adverts which try (successfully) to manipulate feelings about mayonnaise by connecting them to happy family mealtime scenarios and so on.<p>But people are not clamouring for George R. R. Martin&#x27;s latest &quot;Game of Mayonnaise&quot; installment. Nobody is hanging on Stephen King&#x27;s publishing schedules looking for something, anything, about mayonnaise. People aren&#x27;t quoting &quot;top 10 films of 2015&quot; and including Spielberg&#x27;s latest mayonnaise epic, or desperately hoping that the decision between Amazon Prime and Netflix will be settled once and for all by whichever one finally gets on the missing mayonnaise content.<p><i>This is collective intelligence at work. This will be how the Wild West is won. The industry hasn&#x27;t been able to police ourselves, so consumers will force change upon the industry themselves.</i><p>Yes. But if you read that as &quot;the stories we are telling about mayonnaise aren&#x27;t good enough&quot;, then I think you&#x27;re not receiving the same message that the collective intelligence is sending.<p>You clicked three adverts a day, every day, on your phone - <i>every single one by accident</i> - a hundred adverts and not a single one you were interested in - and you read that as &quot;advertising is great, just think how good adblockers will make it&quot;?