collapsed desire and the spatial considerations of advertising

Advertising has long lived 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 ads 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.

Interstitial space, or the white space of media, the pause between beats, once gave advertising part of its power. It created a cognitive 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. Its structure and narrative was fundamental to persuasion and was self-aware of its capabilities. 

Previously, ads lived between things. Interrupting a TV or radio show, punctuating a commute, or waiting on the next page. That between-ness gave advertising its rhythm. It lived in the intermission, the commercial break, the white space. It both interrupted and structured experience. Ads were punctuation, not content. Now, in the endless scroll, there is no space left between as it's fused with content. And if everyone is an ad, then actual ads become invisible. And they have.

By the 1960s, advertising displaced art. Advertising redefined what culture looked like through the medium of its time. Ads became art. Pop artists like Andy Warhol satirized this shift through screen printings of soup cans, he was documenting it as it happened.

Advertising became the dominant aesthetic and communicative force of the modernist age. It not only shaped consumer behavior but also became the central medium through which people experienced beauty, identity, aspiration, and also time. Now, 60+ years on, we live in a time when anyone with Internet access and a credit card can create advertising. Today, advertising is no longer art. Its function has shifted in the age of performance metrics and ecommerce. Ads are now an individual experience, not a shared experience. Art is now something else, but that’s for another day.

In the broadcast age, brands spoke from on high, as it were. The message was crafted, polished and distributed. There was distance, and with that, a certain type of power. This spatial distance mirrored a psychological one. Ads lived within a layer above us, between us and around us. There was room between viewer and message, space to interpret, resist, or absorb. That space made persuasion possible. But then, that distance collapsed and inverted.

The rise of social media folded the stage into the crowd, as it were. What was once broadcast became dialogue. The architecture of media collapsed inward through the proliferation of the smartphone, a glowing rectangle in our hands. The feed flattened out all of the media space. Everything now happens in the same compressed dimension. Brands became people. People became brands. And the feed became the medium where everything collapsed - message and messenger, identity and image, product and performance. We stopped watching ads when we started watching each other.

Brands then set about to chase authenticity - but  in doing so, lost authority. In mimicking people and taking on traits, values and beliefs as content, they eventually became parodies. Advertising didn't die suddenly. It drowned in sameness and a lack of skilled strategy and execution in the age of self-service ad managers. So now, the platforms that once carried it are flooded with its residue. Endless content marketing, influencer-sponsored content and "collabs" that read like poorly written fiction. 

Direct marketing evolved into performance advertising. More of a marketing automation sequence and science of test, tweak, reframe, repeat. Effective but distinctly removed from what advertising once was. There was previously a shared experience. Now there is just a backend dashboard. Clicks, conversions, and funnels within a flattened logic. Advertising became physics. Perhaps the antithesis of art.

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, but 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. We no longer create ads in marketing today. We create systems that behave like attention.

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 and drift. 

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.

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 from 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 no longer seeks attention. It seeks to fit. 

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.