If you think of ads (paid media: a portion of the marketing budget) as an investment that a business makes in hopes of boosting revenues enough to counteract th

If you think of ads (paid media: a portion of the marketing budget) as an investment that a business makes in hopes of boosting revenues enough to counteract the increased costs, then you can consider advertising an investment. And the risk here is that we're seeing companies post strong revenue growth, and they attribute some percentage of that success to ad spend, when in reality their revenue growth may be completely decoupled from how many impressions or conversions they're seeing from ads. That brings up an important question here - how many companies are still measuring the ROI of their advertising via "impressions". Because when you purely measure ad performance as a function of increased conversions (which is just another word for someone signing up for your newsletter, or buying one of your products, or subscribing to your service, etc) then you can get a clear picture of how that ad spend is flowing into your revenue. But when companies just spend $20 million a year hoping to get tons of impressions from pricey Super Bowl ads, they can't trace that ad spend back to revenue. So the risk here of a bubble is mainly - are companies spending more on ads than they really should be to secure more sales? And will companies realize they could be spending half as much on awareness campaigns and get the same results? If they do, then you can expect ad spend to go down and the internet (which is largely funded by its success as an advertising channel) can expect to contract.