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Advertising Industry

$1 trillion spent globally. 60% never reaches the publisher. The industry charges for trust but cannot prove it earned. The VVFL applied to attention: better data → better targeting → higher conversion → more revenue → better data.

1Principles

Identity is the whole game.

The entire ad industry is a Rube Goldberg machine built to answer one question: did the person who saw the ad become the person who bought the thing? Facebook's pixel, Google's cookie, every DMP and CDP — all solving the identity join.

EraPrimary KeyWho Owns ItWhat Broke
Web1IP address + cookiePublisherNothing to target
Web2Cross-site pixel syncFacebook, GoogleApple ATT killed opt-in
Web3Wallet addressThe userAttribution flips bottom-up

Apple's privacy prompt removed the join key connecting "saw ad" to "bought product" — costing Meta $10B+ in a single year. The identity layer isn't a feature. It's the foundation everything else collapses without.

Depth: Principles →
The Vision
Cookie crumbling into pixels — one side dark (Web2 tracking), one side lit by wallet addresses
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Context​

  • Data Footprint — The commissioning instrument for data maturity
  • Jobs To Be Done — The framework that glues provider to consumer
  • Truth, Trust, Identity — The meta-problem advertising exposes
  • Agent Commerce — Agents aligned to the buyer's job, not intermediary margin
  • Sui — Settlement layer for data and value
  • 375ai — Verified physical presence replaces modelled estimates

Questions​

If the data model has six entities and the entire industry exists to make one join work, what happens when that join changes hands?

  • When the Identity entity shifts from platform-owned to user-owned, which of the other five entities breaks first — and which benefits most?
  • If Impression → Settled takes 30-90 days in Web2 and sub-second in Web3, what business models exist only because of that delay?
  • What data does the advertising industry collect that it doesn't need — and what data does it need that it can't collect?
  • Which entity in the data model is most vulnerable to AI replacement — and which requires physical-world verification that no model can fake?