Reflections

Most mobile advertising doesn’t fail because it’s on a phone. It fails because it interrupts. Most mobile advertising is fundamentally broken because it forgets a basic law: advertising should never be intrusive. An ad that blends into what I’m already doing gets a hearing; an ad that blocks what I came to do gets closed, as fast as my thumb allows. Over the past few months, my own phone has been the experiment: Instagram introduced me to products I ended up trying, while a mobile game made me resent a brand I’d otherwise have clicked. Same screen, same person, very different result. When you analyze how new customer acquisition and brand building work across digital ecosystems, the contrast between Instagram and traditional mobile ads couldn't be clearer - and gives us a direction in which to move.      1. Why Instagram Works: Speed, Simplicity, and Seamless Context ...

  Part 2 of Show Me the Market | By Vishal | October 2026 In my previous piece, I argued that AI cannot pay for itself at current pricing tiers. Roughly $3 trillion of debt and obligations sits behind the industry, and a subscription-based market, modelled generously, comes to tens of billions to low hundreds of billions of dollars a year. The gap is too large to close with seats at $20 a month. Neither is the expectation that each individual can sustain multiple 20$ subscriptions – that leaves the B2B revenue stream. That, while looking attractive, is, on deeper analysis, not quite as compelling a case for AI sustenance. The B2B industry operates on a concept of share of profits or percentage of revenue or a similar metric when it comes to technology spends – and they have to spread it across multiple solutions, with being but a share of it. Clearly something has to give – either the models have to change, or the market has to crash – or even both. Current approaches are sim...