I live a fairly sheltered advertising life these days.

Like many people who spend too much time online and slightly too much money on subscriptions, I have gradually paid my way out of the ad-supported internet. Music platforms have premium tiers. Video platforms have ad-free plans. Even the apps that once thrived on interrupting your evening now politely offer to remove the interruptions if you hand over a small monthly tribute.

And so, mostly, the ads are gone.

Except for one place.

I keep one large streaming platform in its ad-supported form for professional reasons. If you spend your days writing about advertising, it feels faintly dishonest to live in a completely ad-free bubble, pontificating about an ecosystem you no longer personally experience.

So every now and then, I let the ads in.

The other evening, during a perfectly harmless 22-minute sitcom episode, six of them arrived in quick succession.

Two were for women’s jewellery.

Two were for razors designed, with great enthusiasm and a certain amount of pastel-coloured optimism, to assist with bikini-line grooming.

The remaining two were for things that also had absolutely nothing to do with a straight Indian man in his mid-thirties who was simply trying to watch a sitcom and eat his dinner in peace.

This was mildly amusing. It was also mildly confusing.

Because if there is one promise the modern advertising ecosystem has repeated, with evangelical certainty, for the better part of two decades, it is that the age of wasteful mass advertising is over.

Television, we were told, was blunt. Digital would be precise.

Platforms know who we are now. Our accounts are logged in. Our viewing histories are mapped. Our email addresses sit at the centre of elaborate identity graphs. Devices, locations, behavioural signals, browsing histories and a frankly unnerving quantity of inferred preferences are all supposedly flowing into systems designed to deliver the right message to the right person at exactly the right moment.

Which is why the bikini razor felt so strangely poetic.

Somewhere inside the gleaming machinery of modern adtech, an algorithm had calmly concluded that what I needed most that evening was assistance with my bikini line.

Now, to be fair, mismatched ads are not a new phenomenon. Television specialised in them for decades. But television never pretended otherwise. It sold reach. You bought a slot during a popular show and accepted that half the audience might not care.

Digital platforms promised something different entirely: relevance.

This distinction matters because the economics of streaming advertising increasingly depend on it. Premium live properties are now commanding steadily rising ad rates, justified not only by their enormous audiences but by the claim that these audiences can be sliced, segmented and delivered with surgical precision.

Except sometimes the surgery appears to involve a butter knife.

The contrast becomes obvious when you wander across the streaming landscape. On another major platform that occasionally inserts ads into a long film, the handful I see tend to be uncannily aligned with my actual interests. Books. Travel gear. The occasional kitchen contraption I did not know existed but now find myself quietly considering.

It is not perfect targeting. But it feels… intentional. Which raises an awkward little question for the industry.

If platforms are charging a premium for digital video inventory on the strength of their targeting capabilities, how much of that targeting is actually happening in practice?

And how much of it is simply assumed to be happening because the system is supposed to be capable of it?

The answer, inevitably, is probably buried somewhere in the dense plumbing of programmatic systems, imperfect data pipelines and the simple logistical challenge of delivering millions of ads across millions of devices without the entire apparatus collapsing under its own complexity.

But from the viewer’s perspective, the equation is simpler. If you promise precision, people eventually notice when the arrow lands somewhere else entirely. And when the arrow keeps landing somewhere else entirely, something interesting begins to happen.

Not outrage. Not rebellion.

Just a slow, creeping indifference to the entire exercise.

Which, for an industry built on the premise that it understands attention better than anyone else, may be the most dangerous outcome of all.