There’s a particular kind of vindication that comes slowly, then all at once.
Display advertising has spent fifteen years being the unloved middle child of the media mix. Measurable enough to be scrutinised, unfashionable enough to be defunded, and technically sophisticated enough that nobody outside adtech really understood why it kept surviving. B2B marketers in particular treated it like a necessary evil, something you did when search inventory ran dry and you needed to justify the impressions line on a media plan.
That era is ending. And the trigger is the last thing anyone expected.
