Ad tech has been getting more personalized (and creepier), but this week I feel like it has jumped the shark. These two new developments in the world of digital advertising will get you either excited or terrified, depending most likely on your job title.

AI-Generated Pause Ads

The next time you hit pause on Amazon Prime Video, not only will an ad appear, that ad may be AI generated and based on the scene in the show/movie you were just watching.

Amazon offered a pretty uninspired example: When a viewer pauses a show during a kissing scene, an ad for Hershey’s Kisses could appear. I’m sure you could come up with much more interesting applications of this tech.

In just a few decades, we’ve gone from targeting people based on what they were reading/watching (print/TV) to what they were doing online (search/social), to creating individual ads for individual people that are aware of the context they’re appearing in. If these ads prove to be successful, our ad budgets may be even more effective in the future.

Read more about Pause Ads

Peak Engagement Ads

We should have seen this one coming, and I’m a bit surprised that it wasn’t already happening: Google plans to start using Gemini to inject ads into YouTube videos at the exact moments we are most engaged.

This is the difference between a business that is driven to maximize the viewer’s experience vs maximizing the advertiser’s experience. A publisher would never interrupt people at the moment they are most likely to be enjoying the video they’re watching — that’s the opposite of what makes sense. But, an advertiser looks at that moment and says: There’s no way that people are going to leave, even if we jam annoying ads in front of them.

Read more about Peak Point targeting