Your Ad Budget Is Feeding Bots: Why the Future Is Physical

I wrote yesterday about how your website is becoming a workflow - the human-facing web contracting as agents take over navigation, discovery, and task completion. The traffic numbers are damning: 51% bots, 69% zero-click searches, publishers losing 30-40% of referral traffic.

But there’s a darker angle I didn’t explore: advertising.

The web’s economic model assumed human attention. Serve ads to humans, convert attention to clicks, monetize those clicks. That model is breaking - not because humans stopped mattering, but because you can’t tell them apart from machines anymore.

Your Ads Are Playing to an Empty Room

The numbers are worse than most marketers realize.

The 2025 Imperva Bad Bot Report found that automated traffic surpassed human traffic for the first time in a decade: 51% of all web traffic in 2024 was bots. Bad bots alone made up 37%, up from 32% the prior year. That’s the sixth consecutive year of growth.

Imperva blocked 13 trillion bad bot requests in 2024. Two million AI-enabled attacks per day.

The financial damage:

• $238.7B wasted on bot-driven traffic in 2024
• 50% of programmatic ad traffic may come from bots
• $172B projected ad fraud cost by 2028

For the first time in a decade, automated traffic surpassed human activity, accounting for 51% of all web traffic in 2024. This was largely driven by the rapid adoption of AI and large language models, which have made bot creation more accessible and scalable.

— 2025 Imperva Bad Bot Report

This isn’t edge-case fraud. This is the baseline. Half of your programmatic budget may be serving impressions to scripts, not people.

You Can’t Bot a Billboard

Out-of-home advertising has a structural advantage: reality.

When someone sees a billboard on their commute, you know three things with certainty:

1. A human saw it
2. They saw it at a specific location
3. They saw it at a specific time

No bot farms. No click fraud. No inflated impressions. The medium is inherently verified because the medium is physical.

When you book an OOH campaign on a Times Square marquee, you know when and where it will appear and that you’ll have an audience - no ad blockers, fast-forwarding, bots, or fake clicks.

— OAAA

The attention metrics back this up:

• 12 seconds average eyes-on attention for OOH ads
• 5.9x memorability advantage over digital
• 97% of UK adults reached weekly by OOH
• 9 in 10 OOH ads pass the attention-memory threshold

Digital advertising optimizes for impressions. OOH delivers actual human attention - the thing impressions were supposed to measure.

The Oldest Medium Is the Newest Growth Story

While digital ad trust erodes, OOH is having a renaissance.

US OOH revenue hit $9.1 billion in 2024 - the first time exceeding $9B. That’s 16 straight quarters of growth. Digital out-of-home (DOOH) is growing even faster: 10.7% CAGR through 2030, with programmatic DOOH projected to exceed $1 billion by 2025.

The advertisers driving this growth tell the story. 25% of the top 100 OOH advertisers are now tech or direct-to-consumer brands. Apple, Amazon, Google - companies that built their businesses on digital advertising - are major OOH spenders.

The infrastructure is modernizing too. Programmatic DOOH lets you buy billboard inventory with the same targeting precision as digital - but with physical verification. Dynamic content adjusts to weather, time, and audience demographics in real-time. The medium is old; the buying technology is cutting-edge.

The $5,000 Minimum Problem

There’s a catch: OOH is still inaccessible.

Traditional billboard advertising requires $5,000-50,000 minimum contracts, sales team negotiations, and weeks of lead time. Self-service platforms for SMBs exist, but they still assume $1,000+ budgets and that you have professional creative assets ready.

The consumer market - someone who wants to put a proposal on a billboard, celebrate a birthday in public, announce a business launch - is completely unserved. There’s a gap between “I want my moment on a billboard” and any actual ability to book one.

This is starting to change. Platforms are emerging that bring billboards to everyday consumers and micro-businesses - AI-generated creative, no minimum contracts, book from your phone. The same democratization pattern we saw with web publishing, video production, and now advertising. The infrastructure that makes OOH programmatic also makes it accessible.

The Bifurcation

Digital advertising won’t disappear. But it’s bifurcating.

One tier: programmatic slop. Cheap impressions served to whoever or whatever visits a page. Metrics that look good on dashboards but represent diminishing human attention. Racing to the bottom on CPM while fraud eats the margins.

Other tier: verified attention. Premium channels where you can prove a human saw your message. OOH, but also CTV, podcast advertising, and other formats with structural barriers to bot traffic. Higher CPMs, but CPMs that represent actual humans.

The middle ground - affordable digital advertising to verifiable human audiences - is collapsing. Either you’re paying premium for proof, or you’re gambling that your impressions aren’t mostly machines.

For brands, OOH is moving from “brand awareness nice-to-have” to core performance channel. When digital attribution is compromised by bot traffic, physical presence becomes the reliable signal.

The web’s advertising model was built on human attention converted to tracked impressions. That model assumed you could distinguish humans from machines. In 2025, you can’t.

Websites are becoming workflows. Destinations are becoming endpoints. And advertising is returning to the physical world - the one place where attention can’t be faked.

The oldest advertising medium turns out to be the most future-proof. Not because billboards are innovative, but because reality is still the best verification system we have.