Advertising's Decline

Just as the industry collapses, ads becoming inescapable

A few days ago, I opened Instagram and noticed something that wasn’t exactly shocking: pay for an ad-free version, £3.99/month. Not a pop-up ad or a sponsored post, but a straight-up offer to buy my way out of constant interruption. Amazon Prime did the same thing to me a month ago. The message was pretty clear in that I could either keep watching and get interrupted more, or pay for a quieter experience. 

I’m starting to realise we don’t dip in and out of advertising anymore. We live inside of it, unless we pay to leave. When did we suddenly agree to live in a world where uninterrupted thought, watching, or scrolling is considered a premium feature?

I grew up around advertising. Both my parents work in the industry and, as a kid, I’d see campaigns their teams were working on. They took months of planning and care. Even if I didn’t fully understand them at the time, I could always tell there was a certain intention behind them, a story that was being told. You were supposed to remember something from it: a song, a line, a feeling.

That’s the part that’s missing now. Advertising didn’t just get more frequent; it got a whole lot emptier. Most of the ads we see today feel like they aren’t designed to stick with us; they’re designed to slip right past us, barely registering before the next one replaces it. They’re not trying to be iconic or memorable. They’re trying to be efficient.

The Levi’s Makeba ad from 2017 is memorable to me for a simple reason: it was intentional in a way that’s now rare. Real people, real music, and a single idea carried through from start to finish. At eleven, still convinced jeans were wildly uncomfortable and refusing to wear them, I wasn’t the target audience, and it still stuck. The intention wasn’t optimisation or being in a thousand feeds; it was to be watched and remembered. Today, ads may still be intentional, but that intention has definitely shifted. If I remember one now, it’s usually because it annoyed me.

What’s ironic is that even my parents warned me not to go into it. “It’s not the same anymore,” they’d say, half-joking, half-resigned. At the time, I assumed that was just the standard generational complaint of “everything was better before.” But now I think they meant something more specific: the industry didn’t just evolve, it thinned out.

Not so long ago, when advertising was finite – a TV slot, a magazine page, a billboard you’d pass every day on the same commute – there was pressure to make something worth the physical space that it occupied. Now, advertising is infinite. It feels less like something we encounter occasionally and more like something we live inside. It fills every single available gap: embedded in YouTube videos, halfway through shows you already pay for, tucked into articles pretending not to sell you anything at all. When sheer volume becomes the goal, memorability becomes instantly optional. 

The result is a world where advertising doesn’t feel like persuasion to buy a product anymore; it feels more like background radiation. Always there, vaguely irritating, and impossible to fully escape — unless you pay, or opt out of modern life entirely. When platforms offer ad-free subscriptions, usually on top of what you already pay, what they’re really selling isn’t luxury. It's relief. They create the noise, then charge you to turn the volume back down.

So when Instagram asks me to pay for an ad-free experience, I’m not really tempted. I’m unsurprised — I saw it coming. Advertising used to want our attention; now it simply assumes it. It’s fair to ask: who cares? Ads are annoying, and this isn’t exactly breaking news. No one is losing sleep over Instagram or Amazon Prime ads. But culture doesn’t always shift dramatically. It changes quietly when the things that surround us every day stop trying to be thoughtful, memorable, or even human.

Illustration from Wikimedia Commons