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Even though it’s mid-August and often the time of Summer Fridays, vacations, and a natural ‘slowing down,’ the tech world only knows one speed: ludicrous (which it was yet again this week). This week on the Brief: we read Zuck’s AI manifesto so you don’t have to, Reddit combats AI slop with AI bots, and Spotify is letting premium users skip podcast ads.
Our stories cover the gamut, but the Spotify one gave me an extra moment of reflection, and I want to double-click on this note. The “skip ahead” button popped up for me a few days ago, and hitting it was exciting. I usually treat my phone like a Nintendo controller when podcast ads start and slam the +15 sec button way too many times and am dropped into the middle of the next segment. I then do this silly dance of alternating between the -15/+15 buttons and never get the commercial break right.
That’s when it hit me: why did we think making podcast ads “commercial breaks” was going to be accepted by people? We’re in a post-commercial break era, the YouTube skip button is 16 years old, for goodness sake! A few of the podcasts I listen to have truly integrated ad reads, Smartness and Acquired are two that are notably great at this… the ads are entertainment, or utility! The programmatic world is likely having heart palpitations because at the next QBR they’ll have to report that 99% of ads were skipped.
The lesson here is force-fitting “the old way of working” into 2026 behaviors and workflows is a fool’s errand, and finding a way to either provide (i) value or (ii) utility into a consumer’s life is the only path forward. If not, you shall be skipped.