Written by Katelyn Phan, a senior at Miami University
You didn’t even register the last ad you saw—and that’s exactly how it was designed.
It slipped between two TikToks or sat quietly between Instagram posts, dressed up like everything else you actually wanted to see. Maybe it looked like someone’s morning routine. Maybe it was a “Get Ready With Me” that just happened to feature a product. Either way, your thumb kept moving.
Scroll. Scroll. Gone.
The strange thing about advertising right now isn’t that there is too much of it. It’s that most of it barely exists at all, at least not to us. We don’t engage with ads so much as we filter them out in real time. And the companies behind them know it.
So they’ve adapted.
The most effective ads today don’t look like ads. They look like content. They mimic the rhythm of your feed so closely that by the time your brain catches up—this is trying to sell me something—you’re already three posts past it.
For multimillion-dollar companies, that’s not a problem. It’s just the cost of doing business.
They can afford to lose your attention 99 times out of 100 because scale makes up for it. Entire teams optimize for the exact second you hesitate. Colors, faces, captions, sound design—all tested, refined, and rebuilt until something breaks through. Attention, for them, is a system.
But that system doesn’t treat everyone equally.
Take Findlay Market in Over-the-Rhine—one of Cincinnati’s oldest public markets, where small vendors like Giminetti Baking Company and Colonel De Gourmet Herbs & Spices aren’t just selling products. They’re trying to stay visible in a city that is increasingly filtered through screens.
None of them are competing with corporations on budget. They’re competing on attention.
A boosted post from a national brand doesn’t just appear alongside them—it overwhelms them. The algorithm doesn’t care that one is a global retailer and the other is a family-run stall that’s been part of Cincinnati for decades. It only cares about engagement.
For small businesses in Cincinnati, there’s no safety net of scale. No endless budget to refine an ad campaign until it becomes invisible enough to work. Just a handful of posts, a limited ad budget, and the hope that someone actually stops scrolling.
And most of the time, we don’t.
A vendor at Findlay Market promoting a weekend pop-up isn’t competing on a level playing field. It’s competing against companies that have turned attention into a science. Against platforms designed to keep users moving. Against feeds built to prioritize speed over awareness.
That means the same behavior—mindless scrolling—that feels harmless on our end quietly determines who gets seen and who doesn’t.
The irony is that the businesses we’d probably care more about—the ones embedded in the fabric of the city we live in—are often the least equipped to survive in a system built on disappearing into the background.
Because to succeed here, you almost have to stop looking like you’re trying to sell anything at all.
And that’s a strange place to be.
When advertising becomes indistinguishable from everything else, we don’t just lose the ability to notice ads—we lose the ability to decide what’s worth our attention. Everything blends together. Everything asks for a second of our time. And most of it gets nothing.
So the next time you catch yourself mid-scroll, it might be worth asking: what didn’t you see?
Because chances are, it wasn’t just another forgettable ad.
It might have been someone in your own city—trying to be seen—and losing to a system that was never really built for them to win.