Most assumptions about advertising presume a human audience: attention, persuasion, emotion, recall. When the decision-maker becomes an agent, those assumptions wobble.
There's a common belief that agents will be perfectly rational and therefore immune to brand or emotional appeal. I don't buy it.
If AGI is modeling humans rather than calculators, then agents inherit our irrationalities alongside our preferences. They won't just optimize for price or efficiency. They'll encode proxies for trust, taste, identity, and past satisfaction. Brand doesn't disappear. It compresses into new signals.
The uncomfortable thought is that the audience of the future may not be people at all, but agents acting on behalf of people.
Which raises a strange question: how do you market to something that represents me, but isn't me?