Absolutely true, but so what? The first banner ad had a click-through rate of like 70%. Novelty works. That's why ad agencies have never gone away: they are tasked with doing something new.

But novelty can exist within a specific frame. The print ads of the 1950s stopped working, and a new approach to print ads was taken in the 1960s. The TV ads of the 1960s stopped working and a new approach was taken in the 1970s. Flashing banner ads that say "Click Here!" don't work the way they did in the 1990s, so a different approach is being taken. That approach will stop working and something new will be ginned up. But that doesn't necessarily entirely invalidate the technology being used or the basic form. Chances are the tech and form evolve, and the evolution will be driven by the dominant companies in the category. Revolutionary change is rare.

Well, there is only so much you can do before you simply run out of subtle options and resort to sledgehammer methods that irritate a substantial portion of the public. We're getting there. It's not there yet but even family members have now installed ad-blockers because of a re-targeting campaign gone bad. Of course that will lead to ad-blocker evasion and so on but in the end it does not look as if we all have the same goals here or if there is any respect between the various parties and that can't end well for all of them.

I've had great good results in thinking of my site as a magazine and trying to target the ads more towards the content and less towards the readers. The content is photo tours of new office design projects, so the ads are banners showing office design products. Readers are interested in the published content, so they are generally going to be interested in the advertising.

In addition to battle between adblocking and adblocker evasion, I think there are going to be a lot more sites with fusions between advertising and editorial (sponsored posts, product placement, and just good pr) making it more difficult to distinguish between the content and the advertising.