I'll concede that the analysis isn't completely without merit, but having spent the last few years in ad tech, I sincerely hope that there won't be a revival. It's a race to the bottom. Publishers are struggling and are increasingly willing to accept ever more outrageous ad products. Advertisers are desperate for advertising that actually works, but will mostly only do what agencies tell them, and the agencies are only interested in maximizing their own margins. In the middle we've got any number of middle men scrambling for some pieces of the cake, sometimes but usually not providing some value, leaving the publishers with a pathetic fraction of the advertiser spend.

So essentially we've got a whole bunch of companies with no growth desperately vying for the attention of 23-year old media buyers who in turn are mostly interested in getting someone to take them clothes shopping and picking up the bill. These companies are doing it mostly by doing ever more intrusive things, since advertisers can't accept that the reason their ads don't perform is that nobody wants their stuff and keeps looking for a silver bullet.

I've come to believe that the only reasonable justification for most advertising is that it's in some sense a way for other industries to subsidize journalism. Since that's going away, I'm looking forward to the inevitable ad tech carnage ahead, and if a potential next wave actually brings higher quality advertising and better end user experiences I'll happily eat my shoes.