Who Actually Made This Decision?

When I ask brands about their Meta spend, the answer is usually a version of the same thing: a digital agency manages it, the dashboard looks great, the CPM is efficient.

Efficient relative to what? I was looking for a $3,000 AWD wagon with a current WoF, and alongside this were paid ads for Mercedes Benz and Cadillac.

Efficient at appearing in front of people, yes. Efficient at what that appearance does to your brand - that's a different question entirely, and one most digital agencies aren't incentivised to ask. For many the model rewards volume and retention of budget, not interrogation about context or positioning.

So here's the question I'd put to any marketing manager running Marketplace placements right now: did you choose this environment, or did someone you pay choose it for you?

There's a meaningful difference. And if you're a brand manager or strategist letting this happen without question, it's worth asking what you're actually being paid to protect.

Context Used to Be a Deliberate Act

I remember advertisers calling upset if a competing brand appeared in the same issue (it still happens!). If there was any sense of product similarity such as a perceived copy, a rival gripe in the same category, then it was a conversation, or sometimes even a complaint we were supposed to act on. If Homestyle ran this type of advertising now, I am certain we would lose clients on the spot, while the budget would move to platforms. We are still held to account for context in ways that now seem almost quaint.

Similar premium brands are now running dozens of simultaneous ads across a platform with no editorial standards whatsoever, apparently without a second thought.

Brands once chose their media environments the way they chose their retail locations, their packaging, their spokespeople. The choice communicated something. Everyone understood that a full page in a design title meant something different to a classified listing. A billboard outside the airport was worth more than one on the side of a suburban dairy. That logic wasn't snobbery, it was strategy.

That thinking hasn't become irrelevant. It's just been quietly abandoned in favour of reach metrics and platform convenience.

I didn't want to click on some of what I saw. Not because I'm precious, but because I didn't want those links in my browser history, or following me around the internet for the next month. That's how degraded the environment has become: a legitimate user, conducting a legitimate search, actively avoiding sponsored content because of what clicking might imply.