Bubble Bubble, Toil & Trouble and Some Brewing (see what I did there?) Inflection Points

May 2024 Wrap-Up

We’ve been talking a lot about bubbles this month. An economic bubble happens when the market assigns a value to an asset that is disconnected from its true economic value. Mortgage CDO’s. Tulips. Dotcoms. You get the idea.

Two that we have been looking at are the bubble that is programmatic advertising, and the one that is anything AI. When billions and billions are going into programmatic ads, you have to wonder about their effectiveness.

Two big problems: 1) the assumption that seeing an ad caused a change in behavior (in many cases, I was going to shop for or buy the thing anyway; and 2) the ad will actually reach a human being who might buy something. In the first case, the ad doesn’t change behavior (as eBay learned). In the second, ad-blockers, clickbait farms and robo-users mean that many ads people pay good money for never reach an actual human. And AI? Don’t even get me started. Yes, it is a Big Deal. But it’s early. We’re waging patient money here at Valize to be in AI for the long haul.

Speaking of which, welcome Kes Sampanthar, Scott Wolfson and Noah Frank to the Valize team to get to what AI will really mean to the practice of management. I couldn’t be more excited!