advertising as a spatial medium

Advertising has long lived not only in our media, but in the rooms we occupy, the streets we walk and the pauses we take.

Ads occupied interstitial spaces: between TV segments, before movies, alongside newspaper columns, billboards across highways, and in magazines. These weren’t just ad placements - they also occupied a cognitive, architectural place - or space - that helped shape the rhythm of modern life. In this architecture, advertising was as much about persuasion as it was about presence. There was space around it and that space mattered and helped define it. Today, that space is gone.

This essay explores how the spatial logic of advertising has collapsed, and what that collapse reveals about changes in perception, embodiment, and cognition. As digital platforms evolve into AI-mediated interfaces, advertising shifts from a communicative event to a system-level operation, having implications for the nature of human attention, memory, and autonomy.

The Loss of Cognitive Rhythm and The Flattening of Attention

Interstitial space, or the white space of media, the pause between beats, once gave advertising part of its power. It created rhythm, separation, a sense of encounter. The ad was something one came upon. It interrupted a flow, asked for attention, and gave the viewer a chance to accept, reject, or reflect. This spacing was not incidental, even though advertising of the time was directly tied to the technology or media, as it always has been. Its structure or narrative was fundamental to persuasion and was self-aware of its capabilities. 

In today's media environments, there is no space between. Autoplay removes the pause. Infinite scroll dissolves the edges of beginning and end. Ads are no longer interruptions; they are embedded. They are the content and the content is the ad.

The result is a flattening of attention. Without rhythm, there is no anticipation. Without separation, there is no contrast. And without contrast, persuasion has become saturation. A kind of ambient presence that seeps in without acknowledgment. We are no longer watching ads. We absorb them passively and nearly constantly.

This erosion of space collapses cognitive rhythm. It denies the mind time to process or resist. Advertising has lost its intentionality and has become an environmental condition.

The Prompt as the New Spatial Logic

Social feeds, while flattening experience, still held a kind of spatial logic: vertical or horizontal movement (via scrolling and carousel image posts) and algorithmic proximity.

But AI interfaces go further and remove the spatial layer entirely.

In a prompt-driven world, there is no scroll, no feed, no container. Just a blank box - a query, and a result. Here, the user no longer navigates a media environment, but invokes it instead. The ad in this model must emerge through prediction.

This shift recasts the role of advertising. There is no space around the ad because there is no place where the ad exists before the user brings it about. It is post-spatial. And in that, the user becomes abstracted. Not a perceiving subject, but a pattern to be completed.

MetaBranding and the Dissolution of the Embodied Consumer

Traditional advertising once appealed to the senses, primarily sight and sound. Modern advertising increasingly appeals to systems.

As AI search, recommendation and personalization become common, it will likely come to pass that brands must optimize not just for human resonance but for machine legibility.

Brands become metadata to be retrieved. Not to move or motivate a person, but to fit a model. That’s different than keywords, as they originate from the other direction, the user side - the market. They are user actions that a brand may intercept and solve.

The embodied consumer fades in this framework. Their place is taken by a behavioral profile, a set of probabilities, a pattern of prompts. The senses are bypassed. Branding now happens in the backend.

Where advertising once physically lived in the world, it now lives in models. The ad is a protocol, an infrastructure. The ad doesn't seek attention. It seeks to fit. 

The Spatial Crisis of Media

This transition marks a deeper transformation in how persuasion operates. Metrics should measure attention and alignment. This is not advertising as we knew it. It is something else. Something less visible, more distributed, more systemic. More logic than message. Compliance over culture.

The history of advertising is, in many ways, a story about space. Space between the message and the viewer. Space between image and self. Space between products and the desires they were meant to fulfill.

In collapsing those spaces, media have not only made advertising more efficient. It has changed the nature of persuasion itself. Without space, there is no distance. Without distance, no reflection. Without reflection, no resistance. Only behavior.