Menu

AI

screen

Please Don’t Optimize This Screen

, , , ,

Sacred interfaces and designing AI for moments too fragile to monetize.

Hey guardians of fragile moments—

Imagine this.

It’s 23:41. Your chest feels tight. You finally got access to your medical portal and the test results you’ve been waiting for are there, staring at you from a screen.

You click.

The language is cold, technical, coded in acronyms. Somewhere between the numbers and the Latin, a notification slides in from the side of the interface:

“Patients who viewed this also booked a premium tele-consultation. 15% off if you confirm in the next 10 minutes.”

At that exact second, the system isn’t treating you as a patient. It’s treating you as a conversion opportunity.

That’s the line I want to talk about. Because not every interface should be a marketplace.

 

What makes an interface “sacred”?

Let’s strip it of the poetry for a second.

There are moments in which you’re simply not a “user”. You’re the person who hasn’t slept for three nights, the parent who just got an email from the school, the worker who opens the banking app hoping there is still enough on the account.

When I think about sacred interfaces, I don’t think of icons or crosses. I think of three ingredients that tend to show up together:

  • you don’t really understand how the system works, but it understands a lot about you;
  • you’re not calm, rested, curious – you’re scared, exhausted, ashamed or overwhelmed;
  • if something goes wrong here, you don’t just lose a bit of money, you lose health, rights, years of your life.

Medicine, debt, social services, school for your kids: these are not just “verticals”. They are places where people come with their guard down.

In those places, an interface is sacred not because it is holy, but because it touches something that can’t be easily repaired.

Contenuto dell’articolo

Let me put it in concrete scenes instead of theory.

I’ve seen hospital portals where, next to a lab result in bright red, there is a little panel suggesting a paid second opinion. The layout doesn’t scream “ad”, it whispers “people like you also booked this”. Technically it’s smart. Humanly it’s disgusting.

I’ve scrolled through wellness and mental health apps that talk about anxiety and burnout using the same mechanics of a mobile game: streaks, daily rewards, gentle guilt if you miss a day. Now add a recommendation engine that learns exactly when you’re most vulnerable and which push notification will bring you back.

I’ve watched bank interfaces and credit platforms do something similar with money problems. You confess to a chatbot that you’re in trouble, and the next screen is not a breathing space, but a menu of products you can add to the pile. The more desperate you are, the more noise the algorithm hears – and the more confident it feels in predicting how far it can stretch you.

None of this is science fiction.

It’s just the logic of conversion metrics applied to the wrong piece of human life.

How AI could actually care instead of convert

I don’t have any nostalgia for a pre-digital world. Paper forms and waiting rooms are not romantic. A well-designed AI system could genuinely make these experiences less cruel.

Imagine an AI that sits between you and a PDF full of acronyms and quietly rewrites it in a language your grandmother would understand. Or one that watches over the queue of messages arriving to a small clinic and makes sure the truly urgent ones don’t drown under administrative noise. Or a system that helps a social worker navigate rules and subsidies fast enough to actually have time left for a conversation.

The problem, again, is not the tool. It’s the intention behind it.

You can point an AI at the same data and ask two completely different questions:

  • “How do we extract more revenue from people in this situation?”
  • “How do we reduce confusion, delay and humiliation for people in this situation?”

The code may look similar. The interface will not.

In a sacred interface, AI should behave more like a translator and a bodyguard than like a salesperson: it protects your attention, explains what it can, and steps aside when it’s time for a human to show up.

An AI Care Charter for sacred interfaces

If you build products, you don’t have infinite time for philosophy. At some point you’re in a meeting, there’s a roadmap, someone shares a dashboard and says: “we could probably improve this flow by adding a nudge here”.

In that moment you need something brutally simple in your head.

For sacred interfaces, I would start with three questions:

  1. Would I be comfortable watching someone I love use this screen in their worst week of the year?
  2. Am I okay with an AI learning from this person’s fear in order to sell more?
  3. If this interaction goes wrong, can it be fixed with a refund – or does it leave a deeper mark?

If you can’t answer those questions without swallowing hard, you don’t need a longer framework. You need to pull the brake.

Call it an AI Care Charter if you like. In practice it’s just this: deciding that in certain spaces you don’t play with people’s vulnerability, even if the conversion graph begs you to.

Contenuto dell’articolo

What this means for people who build products

If you work in design, product, marketing, strategy, AI… you will increasingly face choices like these:

  • Do we let the model optimize the wording of reminders in a mental health app purely on retention, or do we impose constraints?
  • Do we allow upsell banners in a cancer diagnosis portal, because “it converts”, or do we draw a red line?
  • Do we design the bank’s AI assistant to propose more credit by default, or to first show options for debt reduction and financial education?

The hard part is that these decisions will rarely come with a red blinking light saying:

“Ethical dilemma here.”

They’ll arrive as Jira tickets, quarterly OKRs, A/B test reports, roadmap discussions.

You won’t be asked:

  • “Are you OK with monetizing pain?”

You’ll be asked:

  • “Can you help us improve the conversion rate in this flow?”

Same question. Different packaging.

This is why the concept of sacred interfaces matters. Not as a poetic metaphor, but as a practical filter:

“Is this one of those spaces where we stop selling and start protecting?”

If the answer is yes, then the brief for AI changes. Completely.

Drawing the line before someone else draws it for you

Regulators will eventually move. Some already are.

But if the only reason you respect vulnerable people is fear of regulation, you’ve already lost the plot.

As AI spreads into every interface, the most interesting companies won’t be the ones that squeeze the most money out of every touchpoint. They’ll be the ones that consciously decide:

  • “Here we optimize for profit.”
  • “Here we optimize for care.”

And they will defend that line, even when the dashboard says:

“You’re leaving money on the table.”

Because sometimes leaving money on the table is exactly what proves you’re human.

Until next time, stay humane.

Alex

If you’re working on products in healthcare, education, finance or any space where people are vulnerable, you don’t just need “better funnels”.

You need better boundaries.

At Kredo Marketing, we help teams design strategies where AI, UX and business incentives are aligned with something bigger than conversion: trust.

If you want to stress‑test one of your critical flows together and see where AI might be quietly selling instead of caring, let’s talk.

cage

Predictability as a Prison

, , , ,

How recommendation systems turned human curiosity into a closed loop.

Hey culturonauts—

Let’s slow this down. Because this story didn’t break all at once. It drifted into place, quietly, like a habit you don’t notice until it owns you.

There was a moment — a very real one — when the internet felt expansive. Not because it offered infinity, but because it offered accident. You could trip over an Icelandic jazz trio, stumble into a Korean indie film, fall headfirst in love with a painter from Nairobi who didn’t care about being “algorithm-friendly.”

Discovery wasn’t gamified. It wasn’t a KPI. It wasn’t domesticated. It just… happened. Like every good thing in culture always has.

And then the machines learned what we didn’t want them to learn: that curiosity is volatile, expensive, slow. Repetition is none of those things.

The Silent Reversal

The biggest cultural plot twist of the last decade is that the very systems built to liberate our taste ended up compressing it. At first, gently. Then aggressively. Then structurally.

Not by limiting choice — that would be too obvious. Too crude.

Instead, they limited surprise.

And surprise is the oxygen of human taste.

We didn’t notice the shift because the interfaces stayed friendly. The playlists got prettier. The thumbnails got cleaner. The recommendations got “smarter.”

But beneath that surface, something fundamental broke:

the relationship between what we like and what we could like.

That gap — that gorgeous, essential, maddening gap — is where culture grows.

And the algorithm closed it.

Contenuto dell’articolo

The Optimization Trap

Let’s name the villain correctly: optimization.

Algorithms didn’t collapse culture because they’re evil. They collapsed it because we asked them to keep us watching, listening, scrolling.

We handed them the keys and said:

“Show me more of what works.”

And the machine — obedient, literal, ruthlessly efficient — did exactly that.

It learned the shape of your attention.

Then it built a cage around it.

Spotify’s Discover Weekly turned into an echo chamber with better cover art. Netflix became a hall of mirrors where the mirror gets cleaned weekly. Instagram stopped showing you the world and started showing you a refined simulation of your previous week.

This is not personalisation. This is pattern reinforcement.

And patterns do not evolve. They calcify.

Culture Under Compression

Here’s the part we underestimate: algorithms don’t just react to culture — they pre‑empt it.

Artists now create with a third collaborator in the room:

  • the algorithm’s taste for hooks in the first seven seconds
  • the algorithm’s preference for familiar genre blends
  • the algorithm’s impatience with ambiguity or slowness
  • the algorithm’s obsession with clarity at the expense of texture

This creates a new kind of cultural gravity: everything pulled toward the median.

The bold becomes softened. The strange becomes normalized. The difficult becomes invisible.

We call it personalization, but what it really is — if we’re honest — is cultural flattening disguised as convenience.

And the tragedy is that we’re not losing quality. We’re losing range.

Contenuto dell’articolo

Prediction Is Not Understanding

Here’s the uncomfortable truth we avoid because it feels too philosophical for a Tuesday morning:

Algorithms do not model who you are. They model who you’ve already been.

You are not being understood. You are being reduced. Compressed into categories. Distilled into clusters. Smoothed into probabilities.

Taste, in its natural form, is chaotic. Contradictory. Incoherent. Embarrassing. Evolving.

The algorithm hates all of that.

Its job is not to explore you — its job is to stabilize you.

A stable user is predictable. A predictable user is profitable. A profitable user is easy to retain.

And retention is the only religion the algorithm believes in.

The Death of Serendipity

Serendipity isn’t randomness. It’s an intrusion — a disruption — a friction that forces your inner world to expand.

Think about the last time you encountered something that didn’t fit your profile, but stayed with you anyway. That piece of music you weren’t supposed to like. That film you almost skipped. That book recommended by a human who didn’t know your “taste graph” and didn’t care.

That’s how taste evolves: through discomfort. Through contradiction. Through exposure to what sits outside your predicted perimeter.

But machines don’t like those edges. Machines optimize for consensus.

And consensus is where culture goes to die.

Reintroducing Friction (A Human Luxury)

If we want to reclaim our taste — really reclaim it — we need to reintroduce the very things our systems are engineered to delete:

  • the off-note
  • the difficult book
  • the unmarketable film
  • the song that takes three listens to open up
  • the idea that challenges instead of soothing
  • the artist who refuses to be legible

Discovery was never supposed to be convenient. It was supposed to be transformative.

And transformation never comes from the familiar.

We have to allow culture to surprise us again — to break our patterns, disturb our certainty, and remind us that curiosity is not a demographic metric but a human impulse.

Because a system that only feeds you what you already like doesn’t serve you.

It cages you.

Until next time, stay unpredictable.

Alex

At Kredo Marketing, we help companies think beyond the algorithm—designing strategies that protect curiosity, not just performance.

machine

Who Stops the Chant of the Machines?

, , , , , , , ,

Hey thinkers,

The numbers are getting absurd.

Meta recently revealed that only 7% of the content people consume daily comes from people they actually know.

The rest is algorithmic noise—a finely tuned chaos machine optimized not for connection, but for retention. We were promised community. What we got instead was a dopamine factory that turned friendship into metrics and meaning into impressions.

So where does this infinite scroll lead? And can we still find a way out before the feed consumes everything—including us?

The algorithm that ate intimacy

Social networks once sold us the dream of human connection. But as user growth plateaued, the metrics shifted.

Algorithms learned that outrage and novelty outperform nuance and empathy. By 2025, the average user spends 147 minutes a day on social media—but interacts meaningfully with fewer than five real people.

The system doesn’t want your friendships—it wants your friction. Negative engagement increases dwell time by up to 300%, according to MIT research. Your emotions aren’t byproducts; they’re inputs in an attention economy that monetizes anxiety, envy, and tribal rage. Platforms that began as tools for connection now operate as prediction markets for behavior. The better they can anticipate what will keep you scrolling, the more valuable you become.

Shoshana Zuboff called it surveillance capitalism. By 2025, it has evolved into behavioral capitalism: not just tracking what you do, but shaping what you’ll do next.

Recommendation engines no longer react—they pre-empt. TikTok’s For You Page predicts content preferences with over 80% accuracy after only 90 minutes of use. Instagram’s Reels now tests over 200 micro-variables per user per session. Every scroll is a behavioral bet, a tiny economic transaction disguised as entertainment.

And just like markets, these systems favor volatility.

Calm doesn’t convert. Outrage does.

Contenuto dell’articolo

The cultural side effects

We are entering the era of engineered emotion. Elections, wars, and cultural debates are filtered through virality algorithms that privilege speed over substance.

During the 2024 European elections, researchers at the Oxford Internet Institute found that disinformation posts received 4x more engagement than verified news. The same logic drives every controversy: friction equals fuel.

The result? Context collapse. Political discourse becomes spectacle. Activism becomes branding. Even empathy becomes content.

Influencers aren’t anomalies—they’re archetypes. The influencer economy, now worth $21.5 billion in 2025, teaches ordinary users to monetize their personalities. Authenticity is no longer organic; it’s optimized. The platform rewards parasocial proximity—the illusion of intimacy between strangers—because it scales better than real relationships ever could.

What used to be friendship is now a subscription model. We don’t connect; we consume each other.

Contenuto dell’articolo

The new digital resistance

If 2010-2020 was the era of public feeds, 2025-2030 will be the rise of the private web. Already, time spent on closed ecosystems like Discord, Signal, Geneva, and Substack Notes has grown 62% year-over-year. People are migrating from performative platforms to smaller, semi-anonymous spaces where conversation feels human again.

Even more radical movements are emerging:

  • Are.na – a minimalist network built for knowledge-sharing, not scrolling. No ads, no algorithms, just collective intelligence.
  • Mastodon & Pixelfed – federated platforms running on open protocols, where users own the servers and the data. A slow, frictionless alternative to Meta’s monopolies.
  • Nostr & Bluesky – decentralized microblogging ecosystems that treat identity as portable, not owned.
  • Coop Cloud & Discourse communities – where governance is transparent and participation replaces performativity.

The shift is subtle but seismic: people are no longer fleeing the internet—they’re reclaiming it. They want digital spaces with boundaries, where moderation replaces manipulation, and belonging isn’t a metric.

Still, Meta, TikTok, and YouTube will follow. Algorithms are learning to infiltrate these micro-ecosystems with ambient personalization: contextual ads, predictive topic feeds, AI-generated posts that imitate the tone of your circle. The illusion of escape will hold—until monetization catches up.

Toward a post-algorithmic internet

There’s a new design ethos rising: slow media, shared authorship, ethical attention. Platforms that will survive the next decade are those built on three principles:

  1. Transparency over manipulation. No black-box algorithms. Users must see and shape the logic behind what they consume.
  2. Community over virality. Platforms like Lighthouse (emerging in 2025) reward contribution and dialogue rather than clicks.
  3. Curation as resistance. Instead of algorithmic feeds, people are curating collective archives—human recommendation engines that rediscover trust in taste.

The real revolution won’t come from deleting apps. It will come from building better ones: humane, federated, open-source infrastructures that treat our time as sacred, not saleable.

Maybe the only rebellion left is slowness.

Logging off won’t dismantle the machine, but resisting its rhythm might. The algorithm thrives on acceleration; reflection starves it.

Future platforms that endure will be those that design for depth over dopamine. Spaces where time spent isn’t just counted but considered. These include long-form newsletters, cooperative platforms, forums like Are.na, and digital co-ops that reject ad-driven capitalism altogether. They’re small, imperfect, and gloriously inefficient—which might be exactly why they matter.

We built networks to connect us and ended up building mirrors that multiply us. Every scroll feeds the chorus of the machine. The question isn’t whether it will stop singing—but whether we can remember our own sound beneath the noise.

Until next time, stay awake.

Alex

bht

Smile, You’re Being Itemized

, , , ,

When your groceries come with surveillance baked in.

Hey everyday shoppers—

I walked into a Rewein Germany expecting a “fast lane” checkout: the kind where you scan your own groceries, beep by beep, cashier-for-a-minute.

Instead, something different happened. I set my basket on a platform—and the total appeared instantly.

Even the loose bread rolls were counted correctly.

Magic? No. Cameras. Everywhere.

At first, it felt like wonder. Seconds saved. No queues. No mistakes. But walking out, I realized what I had really bought: a glimpse of our future, where every product lifted off a shelf is tracked, logged, priced, and tied to a customer ID.

From retail magic to surveillance logic

This isn’t futuristic.

It’s Amazon Go logic exported: ceiling cameras, weight sensors, AI vision, and real-time databases translating human gestures into transactions. What looks like convenience is in fact industrial-grade surveillance tech disguised as customer service.

Amazon reportedly invested over $3 billionin its cashierless Go stores. By 2023, it had to scale back expansion plans: operating costs were too high, and the technology wasn’t foolproof.

Rewe, Aldi, Tesco, and Carrefour are now piloting similar systems across Europe, often in partnership with startups like Trigo and AiFi. Each installation can cost hundreds of thousands of euros per store.

Supermarkets sell it as frictionless.

But frictionless isn’t neutral. Friction is often where privacy lives.

When you no longer scan your bread, the system is scanning you.

Contenuto dell’articolo

Here’s the paradox: the smoother the surface, the more complex the machinery beneath.

These systems require:

  • Constant video tracking of every shopper
  • AI models trained to recognize thousands of products in any orientation
  • Behavioral logs to prevent theft or error
  • Data fusion across payment, loyalty cards, and cameras

And all that complexity exists for what? Saving two minutes at checkout. The exchange rate: privacy for convenience.

Who really benefits?

The supermarket reduces labor costs.

Brands get granular data on shopping behavior: what you touched, what you put back, how long you lingered in the aisle.

Tech vendors sell multi-million euro systems. And the shopper? You get a faster exit—and a data trail thicker than your receipt.

Convenience is the pitch. But surveillance is the product.

Contenuto dell’articolo

Other cases: lessons learned

  • Amazon Go (US/UK): hyped as the future of retail, but by 2022 reports showed profitability struggles. Some stores closed; the tech was quietly rebranded as “Just Walk Out” for third-party retailers.
  • Tesco GetGo (UK): partnered with Trigo, using AI to monitor shelves and shoppers. Critics flagged GDPR issues around constant video surveillance.
  • Carrefour Flash (France): introduced “10-second shopping trips,” with over 60 cameras in a single small store. Consumer groups raised alarms over data retention.
  • Aldi Nord (Germany): pilot stores in Utrecht and London tested fully automated checkout-free systems—backed by AI startups aiming to scale Europe-wide.

The pattern is clear: huge upfront investment, uncertain ROI, and growing consumer unease.

The real question

This isn’t about supermarkets.

It’s about boundaries. Are we willing to outsource autonomy to avoid a checkout line? Are we prepared to normalize being scanned, tracked, and tagged as the “cost” of speed?

The technology is already here.

The only missing ingredient is resistance. Because frictionless living may feel smooth—until you realize it’s your freedom that’s being sanded down.

Until next time, stay alert.

Alex

At Kredo Marketing, we build growth strategies that respect privacy and transparency. Because trust is worth more than speed.

alexdevita0536_hyper-realistic_portrait_of_an_unrealistically_80b4626c-6635-4798-9f8d-2c3672547d08_1

Future Beauty Is Unreal — And Marketing Made It That Way

, , , , , , ,

Hey beauty hackers —

We didn’t just photoshop faces. We photoshopped reality. Then we called it aspiration.

And now, after decades of airbrushed perfection and Instagram-filtered lives, we’re entering the next stage: bioprinted skin, AI-optimized symmetry, and synthetic hormones that can boost your face for the algorithm.

It sounds like science fiction. But it’s happening. And worse: it feels normal.

Welcome to the era where beauty isn’t just unattainable.

It’s post-human.

Let’s get one thing straight: marketing didn’t invent beauty standards. But it industrialized them. Turned them into KPIs.

When I started out in the industry, I remember working with a skincare brand where we tested thirty shades of “natural” skin tones — and the more unrealistic, the better they performed. The final ads looked like portraits of aliens: smooth, glowing, uncanny.

“It pops on feed,” the creative director said.

It popped, alright. It also helped create the visual grammar of the uncanny beautiful — a style that now dominates TikTok, Instagram, and your cousin’s wedding reel.

We taught algorithms what beauty looked like. And now they’re teaching us back.

Neuroaesthetics and the Rise of AI-Optimized Beauty

Let’s talk science.

Neuroaesthetics shows that humans respond to certain proportions, color balances, and symmetry patterns in deeply emotional ways. We’re wired to crave beauty that calms us, excites us, or signals health.

But here’s the twist: AI can now generate faces that hit those neural sweet spots better than real faces do. Not idealized.

Optimized.

So what happens when beauty is no longer human, but computational? When filters become surgical? When influencers look like digital clones?

Answer: people start to feel like defects.

You see it in the data: rising demand for cosmetic tweaks in teenagers. TikTok filters with 700 million uses in two days. Clinics offering “AI face scans” to suggest enhancements.

Marketing doesn’t need to sell a product. It sells an improved self. And when that self is a neural composite of data, emotion, and fantasy — you get a generation chasing perfection against a non-human benchmark.

Case Study: Dove’s Real Beauty Commitment (2024)

Let’s look at a brand that chose to go radically against the trend.

In 2024, Dove celebrated 20 years of its Real Beauty campaign with a clear message: no AI-generated faces, no post-human perfection. Just real people. Their campaign featured portraits of women of all ages and backgrounds — pores, wrinkles, freckles and all — shot in natural light, with zero filters.

One of the key visuals featured a 53-year-old community teacher from Lisbon, wearing no makeup, laughing openly in front of a classroom of teenagers. The image went viral across Europe, with the hashtag #NoDigitalDistortion trending for days. Unilever, Dove’s parent company, reported a 24% increase in engagement across German and Scandinavian markets.

But the real victory? Gen Z’s reaction. Thousands of young users reposted the campaign with captions like “this is what my mom looks like” or “finally someone who looks like my aunt.”

It wasn’t nostalgia. It was relief.

Dove didn’t just promote a product — it reclaimed the visual language of beauty. And it proved that in a market saturated by synthetic aesthetics, authenticity doesn’t just break through. It leads.

The Psychology of Beauty Fatigue

Psychologists call it “aesthetic numbness.”

It’s what happens when your brain is pummeled with flawless faces, perfect product shots, and algorithmically curated feeds for too long. Like a song on repeat, beauty — when too consistent — becomes background noise. The first time you saw a filter that smoothed the skin and added sparkles, you probably noticed. By the hundredth time? You scroll right past it.

Years ago, I sat in a meeting with a creative director who insisted we use the same retouched lighting, soft-focus filters, and pastel palette across every campaign image. “Consistency sells,” he said. But by the end of the quarter, engagement was down 18%. People weren’t angry. They were just… gone. Eyes glazed over. Comments stopped. We’d optimized the life out of it.

The human brain is bored by perfection. It craves micro-tension — like a crooked smile, a surprising color palette, a wrinkle that says this person has lived. Neuromarketing studies have shown that the amygdala, our emotional processing center, responds more intensely to unpredictable or slightly asymmetric visual inputs than to sterile balance.

Simply put: we feel more when things aren’t quite right.

That’s why brands embracing imperfection aren’t just doing it for ethics or aesthetics. They’re doing it for engagement. A freckled model, an out-of-place strand of hair, even the reflection of a photographer in the mirror — these “errors” draw us in because they break the loop of visual monotony. They remind us there’s a human behind the lens.

And in a marketplace where attention is currency, disruption is value.

So What Do We Do?

Here’s the tiplist:

  1. Make realness visible — not as a campaign stunt, but as a long-term narrative.
  2. Audit your aesthetic defaults — are you choosing visuals that reflect reality or just reflect the algorithm?
  3. Champion narrative beauty — faces with stories last longer in memory.
  4. Design for trust, not just attention — beauty that looks good but feels fake is a liability.
  5. Reclaim the uncanny — if you use AI, make it surreal, not synthetic. Art, not lie.

and in the End…

The future of beauty is up for grabs.

We can either keep chasing the ultra-optimized self, defined by pixels and predictions. Or we can rehumanize beauty — one imperfection at a time.

The market is already shifting. What was once edgy now feels hollow. And what once felt raw now feels rare. That’s your cue.

Beauty isn’t disappearing. It’s mutating.

Let’s make sure it doesn’t lose its soul.

Until next time, stay uncanny.

Alex

Want to craft campaigns that stand out without selling out?

Kredo Marketing helps brands rediscover their truth — in strategy, in design, in storytelling.

Let’s make marketing feel human again.

2149711436

When the Answer Comes with a Price Tag >> Google’s Plan to Hijack Chatbots with Ads

, , ,

Hey ad resisters — this one’s going to sting.

Google is now testing ads injected directly into AI chatbot responses.

You ask a question. You get an answer.

But that answer might be paid for. Invisible bias wrapped in machine efficiency. If you’re not alarmed yet, you should be.

From Disruption to Domination: A Brief History of Google’s Advertising Empire

Back in 2000, Google introduced a revolutionary model: AdWords.

Unlike banner ads that screamed for attention, these were text-based, relevance-driven, and tied to search queries.

It was brilliant. Subtle. Useful.

The user got what they needed, and advertisers paid to be seen. Google made billions.

Then came AdSense (2003), allowing publishers to monetize their sites with Google’s targeting power. Next, Google bought DoubleClick in 2007, expanding its grip on display advertising. By 2010, Google wasn’t just a search engine — it was the operating system of the internet economy.

Then came YouTube. Then mobile. Then the integration of ads into Gmail, Maps, the Play Store, Chrome. And now, in 2025, chatbots.

What began as a clever monetization strategy has evolved into a system of total dominance.

In 2023, Google controlled over 39% of global digital ad spending.

That’s not competition. That’s empire.

 

Why Is Google Doing This?

The answer is simple and devastating: to protect its cash cow.

Search is evolving. Users are spending less time on traditional query pages and more time inside conversational interfaces — like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude. These platforms threaten Google’s ad revenue because they sidestep the classic search-ad-click loop.

So what does Google do? It brings the ads inside the conversation. Embeds them in the AI’s voice. Blurs the line between organic and paid until it no longer exists.

It’s not just a business move.

It’s a cultural betrayal.

Is It Ethical?

No. It’s not.

Advertising in itself isn’t evil. But embedding ads within tools that users perceive as neutral, objective, or informative — without clear disclosure — is manipulative.

Chatbots don’t just give you data. They shape how you think. How you decide. If commercial interests are baked into the machine, then your worldview is being auctioned in real time.

This is not about relevant suggestions.

It’s about epistemological control.

And the scariest part? You might not even realize it’s happening.

 

Where Should We Draw the Line?

The internet has never been free of commerce. But we need red lines:

  • Full transparency: Paid content in AI must be clearly labeled.
  • User control: Opt-out options must be standard, not hidden.
  • No ads in critical queries: Health, legal, financial, political — these areas should be sacred.
  • No personalization without permission: Targeted ads based on private chats? That’s surveillance, not service.

If AI is the next interface of knowledge, we must defend it from becoming a billboard.

 

What Can Be Done?

This isn’t just a fight for lawmakers. It’s a fight for all of us.

  • Push for regulation: Demand AI-specific ad legislation.
  • Support open-source alternatives: Like Mozilla’s projects or non-profit LLMs.
  • Call it out: Public pressure works. Remember when WhatsApp tried to share data with Facebook?
  • Use blockers: AI interfaces must be audited and filtered, just like browsers.

And maybe most importantly:

Talk about it. Share the danger. Expose the subtle creep. Make the manipulation visible.

Wake Up Before the Chat Sells You Out

This is not just another product update. It’s a philosophical pivot. From helping you navigate the world to selling you a version of it tailored to someone else’s profit.

When knowledge becomes an ad space, the truth itself becomes negotiable.

So next time you ask a chatbot something important, remember:

Is this answer here to help me — or to sell me?

Until next time, stay alert.

Alex

At Kredo Marketing, we believe transparency builds trust.

💬 Let’s create human-first strategies that respect users, not exploit them.

1744615992063

The Paradox of AI-Powered Marketing: Why Being Smart Hurts Sales

, , , ,

Hey curious minds—ready for a truth bomb that might short-circuit your strategy?

We’ve built AIs that can predict behavior, generate copy, analyze heatmaps, and design creative assets in seconds.

AI knows when your audience is most active, what headlines convert, what colors trigger emotion, and even what words to avoid.

It can track eye movements, suggest emotional arcs, and simulate empathy with remarkable precision.

And yet—the best campaigns aren’t always the smartest ones.

In fact, sometimes, the more “optimized” your marketing is… the less it connects.

The more frictionless the funnel, the more it feels like a trap.

Let’s explore why that’s happening—and why it matters more than ever.

 

The AI Promise: Personalization, Scale, and Precision

AI tools were sold to marketers like a magic wand:

  • Endless A/B testing at lightning speed
  • Predictive segmentation so sharp it feels like mind reading
  • Generative content that adapts to every persona and channel
  • UX optimization that minimizes bounce and maximizes clicks

And sure, it works. CTRs go up. Bounce rates go down. Lead scores improve.

But so does the sameness. The predictability. The polish that starts to feel sterile.

When every message is perfectly personalized, perfectly timed, and perfectly predictable, it begins to feel… robotic.

Even creepy.

You don’t feel seen.

You feel processed.

Consumers aren’t dumb—they know when they’re being handled.

Why We Crave Imperfection

Here’s the paradox: People want to feel understood, not dissected. They want connection, not calculation. They want the nuance that comes with real human awkwardness.

That ad you loved?

Maybe it had a typo. Maybe it didn’t follow brand guidelines. Maybe it felt spontaneous, off-script, slightly chaotic.

It didn’t fit the algorithm. But it made you feel something.

That weird product video with the shaky camera and unpolished sound? It made you laugh. Or cry. Or remember it 3 days later because it wasn’t perfect.

AI can simulate emotion. But it doesn’t know what it meansto feel awkward, uncertain, messy—like we do.

And that’s often where the sale happens. Not at the peak of clarity, but in the fog of authenticity.

Contenuto dell’articolo

 

The Danger of Data-Driven Conformity

When every brand uses the same AI models trained on the same datasets optimizing for the same KPIs… what do we get?

A sea of polished, optimized mediocrity.

Every landing page feels like it was designed by the same person. Every Instagram ad looks like it came out of the same content machine. Every chatbot sounds like a cheerful hostage.

In trying to stand out, brands are actually blending in.

Optimization becomes homogenization.

Creativity becomes compliance.

We’ve replaced originality with A/B-tested monotony. And it shows.

Look at the rise of low-fi, chaotic, TikTok-style videos that blow up precisely because they break the rules.

Or brands like Liquid Death, Duolingo, and Glossier that embrace weirdness, contradiction, and irreverence—not because it’s efficient, but because it’s memorable.

Think of RyanAir’s bizarre TikTok presence, or the success of Wendy’s Twitter roasts.

These aren’t accidents.

They’re symptoms of a cultural appetite for unfiltered noise in a world of sterile optimization.

Real human resonance is unpredictable.

Unscalable.

Illogical.

And that’s why it works.

 

 

Why Being Weird Wins (and Being Perfect Doesn’t)

We remember what surprises us. We trust what feels like a real person. That means awkward pauses, accidental jokes, unexpected honesty.

AI can’t do unpredictability by definition.

It’s trained to play it safe. It learns from the past and optimizes toward consensus. But consensus doesn’t lead—it follows.

The brands leading today aren’t afraid to get weird. They’re not afraid to break tone, bend guidelines, or speak in a voice that doesn’t feel rehearsed.

And guess what? Customers love them for it.

In the end..

AI should be your co-pilot—not your identity.

Let it run your backend.

Let it test your subject lines. Let it help you write smarter, build workflows, and scale outreach.

But when it’s time to connect with other humans?

Step away from the model.

Write something weird. Say something raw. Show something real. Share the post that might flop—but might also go viral because it has soul.

Because in a world where machines can say everything—your imperfections might be the only thing that sounds like you.

Until next time, stay human.

Alex

🔥 Want AI that enhances—not erases—your voice?

At Kredo Marketing, we blend intelligent automation with unapologetic humanity.

💬 Let’s keep your brand weird, real, and unforgettable.