The paradox sits in plain sight. Dentsu’s own research reveals that 53% of consumers now use AI-enabled chat platforms daily. Fine. But 50% of those same consumers are actively trying to reduce their screen time. Searches for ‘digital detox’ are up 400% year-on-year. And 55% of global respondents told Dentsu they are, quote, tired of the algorithm recommending more and more of the same. The consumer is simultaneously more reachable and more resistant than at any point in modern advertising history. That is not a coincidence. It is cause and effect.

Let me be blunt: the advertising industry has confused volume with value. We have built an extraordinarily sophisticated machine to follow people around the internet – and then acted surprised when they started to resent it. The programmatic ecosystem, the retargeting loops, the infinite scroll of sponsored content, all of it has produced an arms race where brands spend more to be tolerated less. The $1tn question is not how we spend it. It’s whether spending it this way is actually working.

The numbers don’t lie. But they do mislead

The headline growth figure is real. Digital advertising is the engine driving it, with search, social and retail media capturing the lion’s share of new investment. AI-powered targeting tools are making campaigns more efficient by focusing on narrow metrics such as click-through rates, impressions, and cost per acquisition. On a spreadsheet, the story looks compelling. But campaign-level efficiency is not the same as brand-level effectiveness. And here is where the industry is sleepwalking into a structural crisis.

Dentsu’s quantitative research surveyed 4,500 consumers across seven countries in late 2025. The findings are a catalogue of warning signs. Forty per cent of global respondents say the online world is so stressful that they try to switch off as much as possible. Half are rationing their own screen time. Among Gen Z, the generation advertisers are most desperately chasing, 45% are actively seeking to disconnect. Nearly one in three globally say they are interested in so-called ‘dumb’ devices: brick phones, MP3 players, analogue alternatives to the algorithmically managed smartphone. These are not fringe attitudes. They are mainstream consumer behaviour.

Meanwhile, 43% of consumers globally say they have no interest in following AI-generated influencers, and trust in AI-generated content is collapsing faster than platforms can moderate it. Almost 1 in 10 of the fastest-growing YouTube channels are powered entirely by AI-generated content. YouTube and Spotify have both moved to restrict monetisation of mass-produced content.

The ‘Dead Internet Theory’ posits that most internet activity is generated by bots, not humans, and that this may become a reality. We are building audiences of machines to sell to humans who aren’t listening.

The escape economy is a signal, not a trend

There is a reason the Dentsu Creative Trends 2026 report leads with a theme called ‘Escape Velocity’. Seventy per cent of consumers globally agree that modern life is so stressful they sometimes need to escape, rising to 80% among Gen Z. Adults are buying Jellycat stuffed toys, reporting 66% revenue growth, in the same year they are abandoning algorithmically curated dating apps. People are joining Silent Book Clubs and morning coffee raves. Chess is having a cultural moment. Knitting circles are full of twenty-somethings. These are not nostalgic quirks. They are a coherent rejection of the hyperconnected, hyper-optimised, hyper-commercialised attention economy.

The anti-algorithm movement is particularly instructive for marketers. Fashion is seeing it – designers are explicitly rejecting algorithmic homogeneity, and Vogue is moving to quarterly issues to escape the content treadmill. Dating is seeing it – users are abandoning apps in favour of friendship bracelets with phone numbers on them. Culture is seeing it – 63% of consumers say they are drawn to music and TV from earlier generations because it felt less divided and more human. These are people voting with their attention against the system we have built to capture it.

The only durable competitive advantage is being wanted

Here is the contrarian argument the $1tn industry does not want to have: the brands that will win the next decade are not the ones that master the algorithm. They are the ones that make the algorithm irrelevant, because people actively seek them out.

The data support this. Sixty-seven per cent of consumers surveyed by Dentsu say they are more likely to respond to content that feels personalised to their interests – not personalised by surveillance, but personalised by genuine relevance. Fifty-three per cent say they appreciate it when brands engage meaningfully with the communities they belong to. And Gen Z, despite being the most screen-saturated generation in history, shows a remarkable willingness to invest deep attention in brands and properties that earn it, spending hundreds of dollars on limited-edition collectables, engaging with complex entertainment universes, and memorising obscure lore. The attention is there. It is just not for sale at the CPM rate.

Nike launching a Substack newsletter. Belmond producing slow, ambient travel content. Canon running a campaign called ‘No Click, No Prompt’ that celebrates irreplaceable human photography. These are not anomalies. They are early signals of what brand-building looks like when you stop trying to interrupt people and start trying to matter to them. The brands that understand this are making a strategic bet that earned attention compounds, while bought attention depreciates.

The Dentsu forecast is accurate. Advertising spend will hit $1tn. But I would argue that within that trillion, a significant and growing proportion is being misallocated, spent chasing consumers through channels they are actively abandoning, with content they are increasingly trained to ignore, from brands they have no particular reason to trust. The efficiency of the delivery mechanism has become a substitute for the quality of the message. And that is a category error with real financial consequences.

The brief has changed

The advertising industry’s brief has fundamentally changed, and most of it hasn’t noticed. The old brief was: reach the most people, as often as possible, at the lowest cost. The new brief is: become a brand people choose to let into their lives, in a world where the default setting is opt-out.

That is a harder brief. It requires investing in genuine cultural relevance, in product experiences worth talking about, in communities worth belonging to. It requires understanding that 70% of people need to escape the stress of modern life, and deciding whether your brand is part of that stress or part of the relief. It means accepting that following someone around the internet until they buy something is not the same as building a brand they would miss if it disappeared.

Spending more to be heard less is not a growth strategy. It is a slow-motion erosion of brand equity dressed up in the language of performance marketing. The $1tn milestone is impressive. What happens to the trillion after that depends entirely on whether the industry is willing to ask why the consumer is running, before it congratulates itself any further on how fast it can chase them.

About Musa Kalenga:

A technologist, marketer, brand communicator, and entrepreneur, Kalenga is the Group CEO and a shareholder of Brave Group, and a co-founder of Bridge Labs. A member of the DukeCE faculty, Kalenga teaches about digital transformation, business growth, women in leadership, and allyship. An accomplished author, Kalenga uses his writing to share transformative insights and inspire action. His first book, Ladders and Trampolines, explores the ‘Trampoline Mentality’, a bold approach to achieving exponential growth. In The Brave Code, Kalenga shares his journey with Brave Group, offering a blueprint for African innovation by merging creativity and technology. His upcoming work, Do it Blind – Optimism in the Age of AI, envisions a future where AI enhances human potential, encouraging readers to embrace technological change with positivity and purpose.

About Brave Group:

Brave Group is a tech-forward, innovative communications company that delivers fully integrated brand solutions that combine creativity, strategy, and technology to grow brands. Brave is a hivemind of specialised businesses, including House of Brave (an integrated creative advertising agency), BOLD (a PR and corporate communications company), and Bravado (an experiential marketing firm). These Brave companies work together seamlessly to create innovative, relevant solutions that shape culture and power measurable business value. Brave’s clients include GEPF (Government Employee Pension Fund), Unilever, Tiger Brands, African Bank, Kenvue, MasterChef, and the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits University). For more information, go to: https://bravegroup.co.za.