How Mark Zuckerberg Finds Your Perfect Pair of Shoes

Summary

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What Next: TBD — "How Mark Zuckerberg Finds Your Perfect Pair of Shoes"

Slate Podcasts | Host: Lizzie O’Leary | Guest: Sarah Fisher (Media Correspondent, Axios) | April 26, 2026

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Overview

This episode explores the profound changes happening in online advertising, focusing on the evolving dominance of tech giants like Meta and Google, the rise of AI-driven ad targeting, and what that means for both businesses and consumers. Host Lizzie O’Leary sits down with Axios’ Sarah Fisher to dissect how the future of advertising is being shaped — from the decline of cookies to the promise (and creepiness) of AI finding your “perfect pair of shoes.” Along the way, they investigate privacy, the changing role of publishers, and how the ad experience is changing for ordinary internet users.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Basics of Digital Advertising Today

• Two Main Ad Types:

  • Performance Ads: Highly targeted, encourage immediate action (click, buy).
  • Brand Ads: Broad exposure, storytelling, top-of-the-funnel awareness (Super Bowl-style, TV, big events).
    (Sarah Fisher, 01:55)

• Self-Serve Power:

  • Platforms like Meta (Facebook, Instagram, Threads) and Google offer user-friendly tools even for small businesses, democratizing ad buying.
    (Sarah Fisher, 03:12)

2. The Power of Meta and Google

• Market Share:

  • Meta and Google together still hold nearly half of all digital ad spend.
  • Other platforms making gains: Amazon, Walmart, Alibaba, and notably ByteDance (TikTok’s parent company).
    (Sarah Fisher, 10:48)

• Shift in Dominance:

  • Meta is now poised to surpass Google in net ad revenue, thanks to AI innovations and shifts in how people interact online.

3. Antitrust & Market Concentration

• Recent Antitrust Rulings:
  • Google’s antitrust loss in 2025 seen as more symbolic than practical. Remedies haven’t forced Google to make meaningful changes or divest major assets.
  • "It did represent a turning point where we understood that market power is too heavily consolidated... But it was not a landmark moment yet, at least because so far it has not fundamentally changed the ecosystem..."
    — Sarah Fisher, 13:54

4. The AI Revolution in Advertising

• AI Supercharges the Giants:

  • AI tools are giving Meta and Google an efficiency edge, letting them serve better-targeted ads and grow faster than the rest of the ad industry.
  • "AI is going to make the biggest players bigger and stronger and it will create an even larger gap between them and some of the smaller players..."
    — Sarah Fisher, 15:03

• From Cookies to Signals:

  • Tracking is shifting from privacy-unfriendly cookies to more sophisticated, less invasive AI-generated signals.
  • "We've been able to create and find new signals... much more privacy centric and it's also much more effective."
    — Sarah Fisher, 17:34

5. The User Experience: More Personalized, Less Intrusive?

• Ad Load Management:

  • Companies like Meta carefully control how many ads users see to avoid overwhelming them.
  • Instead of inundation, users simply spend more time engaged, giving advertisers more surface area for outreach.
  • "The consumer is just going to be spending more time."
    — Sarah Fisher, 16:23

• AI-Personalized Shopping:

  • Platforms use AI to identify not just who you are, but what specifically you want — adapting in real-time (color preference, style, etc.).
  • "Meta identifies ... and they start serving you ads for white shoes and high heels... They then can infer that they need to be sending you more products that lean into the color..."
    — Sarah Fisher, 20:25

• Privacy Paradox:

  • Ads are more targeted but allegedly more privacy-conscious.
  • Many consumers find this helpful or convenient, rather than creepy.
  • "Most people, if they get targeted... their reaction is likely, 'Oh yeah, thanks for reminding me.'"
    — Sarah Fisher, 28:21

6. Barbell Economics and the Squeezing of the Middle

• Polarization of Ad Spend:

  • Brand advertising (big campaigns, events) and hyper-specific performance ads flourish.
  • The “middle” (typical website ads, mid-level campaigns) is hollowed out.
  • "We're seeing what I call barbell economics in advertising..."
    — Sarah Fisher, 22:34

• Tougher Times for Publishers:

  • News and content sites, previously reliant on traditional banner/display ads, are struggling as brands move ad spend elsewhere (email, social, direct-to-consumer, events).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the meaning of AI in ads:
  "AI is going to make the biggest players bigger and stronger and it will create an even larger gap between them and some of the smaller players..."
  — Sarah Fisher, 15:03

• On the evolution of what constitutes an ad:
  "For a long time, advertising was meant to tell a story and make you feel something... What's shifted now is advertising is meant to be more efficient. It's supposed to help you buy things that you don't even need great stories to tell in order to complete a purchase."
  — Sarah Fisher, 26:55

• On consumer acceptance:
  "Consumers... feel like they're getting great value by trading some of their data for access to free tools and products. So this is not something I think the public is going to be in uproar about."
  — Sarah Fisher, 25:32

• On parenting and ads:
  "I’m not sure what an ad is anymore... the very nature of the business is changing. But I can’t quite say what explanation I will give him, you know, 10 years from now."
  — Lizzie O’Leary, 26:41

• Meta’s personalized product pitch:
  "Mark Zuckerberg said that new agentic shopping tools will help people find... just the right, very specific set of products."
  — Lizzie O’Leary, 19:34

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Timestamps of Important Segments

• 01:27 — Lizzie O’Leary introduces the two types of digital ads.
• 03:12 — Meta and Google’s dominance; self-serve ad platforms.
• 10:48 — Breakdown of digital ad market; Amazon, Walmart, ByteDance's rise.
• 12:56 — The impact of Google’s antitrust defeat, or lack thereof.
• 14:41 — The disruptive role of AI in the ad business.
• 16:23 — How the consumer ad experience is evolving (ad load).
• 17:34 — Shift from cookies to AI “signals” for targeting.
• 19:34 — Zuckerberg's vision: AI finds your perfect product.
• 22:34 — Advertising "barbell economics" and the squeeze on the middle.
• 26:08 — Teaching kids about ads in an increasingly ambiguous landscape.
• 26:55 — The function of advertising has changed: “feelings” vs. efficiency.

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Conclusion

The future of advertising is rapidly evolving, driven by AI, shifting consumer engagement, and the unwavering dominance of Meta and Google. While users may notice smarter, more relevant ads (and perhaps fewer shoe-chasing cookies), the structural changes underway have big implications for publishers, privacy, and how we understand the purpose of ads themselves. As Sarah Fisher notes, convenience and utility often win out over privacy concerns — and as these systems get “smarter,” what counts as an ad may become harder to define than ever.

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Transcript

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[Lizzie O'Leary]

So let's say that I run the Lizzie Corporation. It sells, I don't know, cute fanny packs for stressed out moms. I want to put some ads online so people learn about my company. I want to know how to do that.

[Sarah Fisher]

Oh man, it could work in so many different ways.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

I asked Sarah Fisher, who's the media correspondent at Axios, what a company my company would do in 2026.

[Sarah Fisher]

Really, there's sort of two main buckets, if you will, for advertising. One is called performance, which is where you buy ads that are heavily targeted and customized to people on platforms such as Facebook or Instagram or Google. And the goal is to get that end user to perform, to click or to buy something. The other type of ad that you could buy is what we would call a brand ad. And that type of ad is really about exposing a user at the very high level, top of their marketing journey to what your company is and what it does. You might not necessarily need them to take an action on that ad.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

Today people could, for example, come hang out at the Tired mom pop up

[Sarah Fisher]

house at Coachella and so those ads don't need to necessarily be as precisely targeted and customized. They need to have much more of a storytelling message. And so those ads typically get placed on video platforms like tv and they're

[Lizzie O'Leary]

what you know from your childhood, from the super bowl, and yes, from Mad Men. But the ad giants of today are obviously not two martini lunch guys. They're tech companies.

[Sarah Fisher]

Meta and Google are the two largest advertising platforms in the world by far. We're talking well over several hundred billion dollars in advertising revenues between the two of them. And the reason that they are so dominant is, yes, because of their scale. If you are an advertiser looking to reach a particular audience, there are so many users within the Meta social network across its apps like Threads and Facebook and Instagram and WhatsApp. But also they just have very sophisticated advertising technology platforms that make it easy for a company or person of any size to be able to buy the ads themselves through what we would call a self serve platform.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

So Lizzie Corporation wouldn't need to hire an agency or even a marketing expert. The reason that I wanted to call Sarah apart from developing fictional businesses in my head is that the online ad world is shifting in profound ways. Meta is now expected to surpass Google in net ad revenue this year. That prediction came from the trade group Emarketer. It's the kind of vanilla sounding corporate report that people might look past, but when you go deeper, it becomes a story about how we buy things, who is selling to us and how AI is rapidly changing.

[Sarah Fisher]

All of speaks to a much broader trend of some of the headwinds that are facing search based advertising companies. Meta is a social based advertising company. It is not leveraging keyword based intent queries to serve ads. That's search. Meta is leveraging a network that has an understanding of who you are and what you care about through what you engage with in social to sell ads. And right now in the agentic era, search is so rapidly being disrupted that this idea of traditional search advertising keyword based showing up in search results as promoted articles or clickouts that is being fiercely disrupted.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

Today on the show AI is about to serve you ads for products you didn't even know you wanted. Have we handed over even more of our privacy or convenience? I'm Lizzie o' Leary and you're listening to what Next tbd, a show about technology power and how the future will be determined. Stick around. This episode is brought to you by Bill, the intelligent finance platform that helps businesses and accounting firms scale with proven results here at what Next CBD we know business, and in businesses across America, smart people are stuck doing the grunt work. You know the drill. Those hours when you could be brainstorming big ideas, you're instead filling in spreadsheets, filling out invoices, or hunting down somebody else's signature. Bill wants to change that. With AI Powered automation, Bill removes the busywork from your account's payable workflow. They handle capturing invoices, routing approval approvals, and syncing with your accounting software so that your team can focus on growth instead of paperwork. Bill is so reliable, over 90 of the top 100 accounting firms in the US trust it to simplify and secure their bill payment processes. Bill's handled over a trillion dollars in secure payments and is ranked number one overall on G2's 2025 list of best accounting and finance products. So stop the guesswork and start scaling with the proven choice. Go with the company whose financial infrastruct trusted by nearly half a million customers. Ready to talk with an expert? Visit bill.comproven and get a $250 gift card as a thank you. That's bill.comproven terms and conditions apply. See Offer page for details. Starting your own business is never easy. Starting your own podcast? That seems easy, but actually, there are a ton of landmines to step on along the way. Finding producers, selling ads, and connecting to WI fi. Oh, does that sound straightforward? It's not. I'm talking about sitting in coffee houses for hours after buying one scone. I'm talking about sitting in hotel lobbies and pretending your backpack is luggage.

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[Lizzie O'Leary]

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[Lizzie O'Leary]

AI for a free estimate. For people who don't follow this, like when you look at the digital ad market, how much do Meta and Google control and then kind of who comes next, who's trailing behind them?

[Sarah Fisher]

Meta and Google for a long time would take in more than two thirds of new digital ad dollars, meaning any growth in the market. Today they represent a little less than half of all total digital ads spent. That is astronomical. That means every other publisher around the world is fighting for the other 50%. In terms of who comes next. There is a growing sector within the advertising industry that is starting to command more and more dollars and that is e commerce platforms. So primarily Amazon. But then you're also seeing other marketplaces including in China like Alibaba and then here in the United States like Walmart that are catching up. We've seen a massive proliferation of what we call retail media networks or shopping companies that are standing up their own ads businesses and then the other big companies and sectors that are rising. The one that we have our eye on, which is set to soon overtake Amazon in growth and in scale is ByteDance, which is the parent company to TikTok.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

I mean, what you're talking about is, you know, something that I think even a casual consumer could see, right? Like where you are getting ads on your phone and where you are not seeing them in the way that you might have 10 or 15 years ago. But I also really want to dig into what, at least to me feels like a really important pivot moment. And I think of that as 2025. Google lost this huge antitrust case about their ad practices last year. A judge ruled they maintained an illegal monopoly. And to me that was almost like a period on the end of a sentence of like one era of advertising. I wonder what you think about that moment and like how it set the stage for where we are now.

[Sarah Fisher]

It is not considered to be a pivotal moment yet because we don't know what remedies or what punishment Google will need to adhere to in response to that guilty verdict. And we are not expecting it to be meaningful. Google also lost a landmark search antitrust trial the year before and it was barely forced to do any concessions. It didn't have to divest its Chrome browser. It didn't have to give up lucrative multibillion dollar distribution deals with phone makers like Apple. So nobody believes that Google is going to meaningfully suffer as a result of this advertising antitrust case loss. In a worst case scenario, if a judge determines that they need to spin off or divest a part of their ad network, it's the part of their ad network that puts websites on other publishing partners, properties that would not be super detrimental to Google. It has become a smaller and smaller part of Google's business over the past few years as Google has invested much more in search, AI and YouTube. And so you were right that philosophically it did represent a turning point where we understood that market power is too heavily consolidated amongst a few players and something should be done. But it was not a landmark moment yet, at least because so far it has not fundamentally changed the ecosystem by forcing Google to do anything different with its business.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

Where does AI fit into this? Because if we don't have a remedy yet from a federal judge, that would change Google's landscape. AI certainly does. I think even, you know, a casual Internet user is like, oh wait, I'm getting AI summaries at the the top. I'm not clicking through, I'm not seeing links, I'm not seeing ads.

[Sarah Fisher]

So AI is going to make the biggest players bigger and stronger and it will create an even larger gap between them and Some of the smaller players and we're already seeing this play out, they're reaching record revenues and they are growing their ad businesses at a much higher rate than the rest of the ad sector and at the rate of the global gdp, typically with advertising. Advertising as a sector grows at the same rate as the GDP because it's a reflection of consumer sentiment and buying power. When you see big companies growing their ad businesses faster, it means that they have some sort of advantage. And in their case, it really is the AI tools that make their ad businesses far more efficient. So the bottom line is AI will make the bigger guys even bigger.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

And how does that translate to a consumer? Like I was looking at some of Meta's numbers and you know, reels watch time in the US was up more than 30% during a recent quarter. Like does that mean that I, as a consumer I'm just going to be inundated with more and more online ads? Like what's the user experience? There's.

[Sarah Fisher]

They are very careful, these platforms to manage for something that is called ad load. They recognize that they will inadvertently push users away from their platforms in a way that's detrimental to engagement if they serve too many ads, if the same ad is served too frequently. And so what they're trying to do is to increase engagement so that way they can continue to load ads at the same type of frequency and clip. But it doesn't feel like you're getting inundated. So I don't think that the consumer experience is going to feel like they're being bombarded. The consumer is just going to be spending more time. What I do think is going to change is that in the first iteration of digital advertising on the web, we were very dependent on cookies or Internet tracking pixels from third parties to follow you around the web and then re serve you ads based off of what you had already engaged with.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

This is why my coffee table followed me around for a year and a half after I bought it.

[Sarah Fisher]

Correct. And this was considered a not very privacy friendly or positive user experience. What's happened in the AI era is we've been able to create and find new signals to understand what you are interested in that is not based off of your personal tracking history. It's much more privacy centric and it's also much more effective. So the reason that users I think are not going to feel like they're inundated is because the ads that are being served to them are going to be served and targeted to them in a much more sophisticated way.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

When we come back. Mark Zuckerberg finds you the perfect pair of shoes.

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[Lizzie O'Leary]

I'm trying to figure out like what that looks like. Mark Zuckerberg said that new agentic shopping tools will help people find and he called it just the right, very specific set of products. That sounds like what you're talking about in terms of really meeting consumers exactly where they are. But how does that work in practice?

[Sarah Fisher]

So in the agentic era, in the AI driven web, think about it like there's different layers. The first layer is the demand platforms, which are AI companies, whether that's a chat bot like ChatGPT, or it's a social media network like Meta that uses AI. They all need to decide universally sort of standards for how we're going to transact on this new web. And on the other side, they need suppliers. So whether that is, you know, retailers with product catalogs or premium publishers with quality content, they need to create a marketplace so that these two entities can transact with one another in a way that creates a better consumer experience. And so right now what we're seeing is the tech giants are coming up with universal protocols to be able to align on product catalogs that AI companies can pull from to surface in chatbot queries that big tech companies can pull from when they are Suggesting different shopping opportunities and experiences so that it's very seamless and so that it can be more easily personalized. So that's like the foundational layer of what's happening. On top of that, the platforms like Meta, they are getting better at helping brands who want to sell you stuff, optimize and test what's going to work for you and what's not. So let's say Lizzie, you are looking for a white high heel and Meta identifies that and they start serving you ads for white shoes and high heels and they're noticing that you're engaging a lot of with the white shoes but not the heels. They then can infer that they need to be sending you more products that lean into the color of the product as opposed to the shape. That's what we can expect in the future.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

I wonder how that is gonna translate kind of as we go forward, like, because I think you could make an argument that getting more sort of specific, hyper tailored things are better from a privacy standpoint than being tracked around the Internet by cookies, which people as you mentioned, really didn't like. At the same time, there's also something very, I think surreal about being served a specific thing tailored just for you. How long do you think it will take before we have a sense of like how this works, whether it works.

[Sarah Fisher]

So it's working. This is what I would tell you. If you think about advertising as a straight line, that line used to have the same thickness throughout the top of the funnel, which is brand awareness ads. The middle of the funnel, which is like kind of brand awareness but a little bit more performative and at the bottom of the funnel which is just buy a product. What's happening now is it's actually the middle is being flattened out and we are seeing what I call barbell economics in advertising where you either as a brand are going to invest very, very, very heavily in the high profile brand ads which are very expensive things like a Super bowl commercial or you know, I think about Pinterest having a phone free activation at Coachella. So you're going to invest very, very heavily in that brand experience, which is not highly personalized at all. It's meant for everybody to have a shared experience. And then on the other side you'll also invest very, very heavily in that very niche performance advertising. Anything in the middle is what's we're seeing get bottomed out. And unfortunately a lot of website publishing is in the middle.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

Yes. Raising my hand as a journalist.

[Sarah Fisher]

Yes, yes. So news publishing, a lot of the tends to be in the middle. What's going to happen is a lot of money is going to continue to go into search, social and AI chatbot platforms for performance. And then the brand advertising is going to continue to flourish. But it's not typically done on websites. It's done through more direct to consumer products such as email newsletters to an extent, some subscriptions and podcasts, irl, real life events, streaming television. But the websites that you and I can interact with a lot, they're not going to be served well by this transformation. And that's why I think so many brands and news companies are diversifying away just being from being just reliant on websites.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

Do you think this is a moment where it becomes truly clear, like from a consumer standpoint that Meta and Google are ad companies? I know you know that, I know that. But like I, I wonder if that permeates the consciousness or already are we already long past that moment?

[Sarah Fisher]

I think the public understands that we live in a more efficient world. Anybody that you've talked to has likely bought an ad on Instagram. I don't know that they're thinking about the existential problems that it can create when one or two companies have so much market power, especially because a lot of these platforms are free for everyday users. So they feel like they're getting great value by trading some of their data for access to free tools and products. So this is not something that I think the public is going to be in uproar about. What I do think the public is concerned about is the way that AI writ large is impacting the economy and jobs. Now, whether or not they place the blame on big advertising platforms for that, I don't know. But I do think that they recognize that this fundamental shift will impact society in a way that's bigger than just their shopping experience.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

So I have a five year old, he is just becoming aware of ads as a thing. And this is something that we've talked about because I'm trying to get him to learn how to think critically. When he sees a post about a toy or a video on YouTube, I'm like, oh, well, how does that make you feel? What does it make you want? It makes me want it. I said, right, that's its job. Its job is an ad. Its job is to make you want a thing. And listening to you, it's making me think like, oh, I don't even, I'm not sure what an ad is anymore. It feels like something where the very nature of the business is changing. But I can't Quite say what explanation I will give him, you know, 10 years from now.

[Sarah Fisher]

For a long time, advertising was meant to tell a story and make you feel something. In the Mad Men era, that was the whole plot. What's shifted now is advertising is meant to be more efficient. It's supposed to help you buy things that you don't even need great stories to tell in order to complete a purchase. For example, common household goods like toilet paper is a classic example of this. We really don't need targeting for something like toilet paper because the vast majority of humans are going to use that product. What's different now is if we know that you're running out of toilet paper, we are going to use very sophisticated tools to help you ensure that you're reminded you need to be restocked. And so even goods that at one time were not heavily personalized towards you are now going to be. And there is an element that I think consumers understand that can potentially feel privacy invasive towards that. But we've gotten to a place where it goes back to what I was saying that these free services offer such support and help in our lives that consumers were just not seeing an uproar about this. Most people, if they get targeted because of Amazon, knows their purchases that says, you know, here, buy some soap because you haven't bought soap or mouthwash or whatever in many months. Their reaction is likely, oh yeah, thanks for reminding me. Not, that's creepy. How did you know that? So I think we're just coming to a world where even things that weren't hyper personalized will be. I don't see consumers being up in arms about it, to be honest.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

Sarah Fisher, thank you so much for talking with me.

[Sarah Fisher]

Thanks Lizzie. Good to talk to you.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

Sarah Fisher is the media correspondent for Axios. And that is it for our show today. What Next TBD is produced by Patrick Fort. Our show is edited by Evan Campbell. Paige Osborne is the senior supervising producer for what Next and what Next tbd. And Mia Lobel is the executive producer of audio here at Slate. TBD is part of the larger what Next family. We'll be back next week with more episodes. I'm Lizzie o'. Leary. Thanks for listening.

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