It's not unreasonable to think that a lot of current digital ad spend is 1) an arms race for slices of a pre-existing attention pie that also resembles a protec

It's not unreasonable to think that a lot of current digital ad spend is 1) an arms race for slices of a pre-existing attention pie that also resembles a protection racket, 2) a huge waste of money. There have been a couple of natural experiments showing #2 where entire digital ad spends were slashed at once with little to no impact. As for #1, look at where a massive chunk of Google's revenue comes from: companies trying to squat their own name and similar keywords to prevent some competitor's product from showing up next to their own.