Science & Tech Quote by Jef I. Richards

Internet advertising didn’t just create a new marketplace; it created a new anxiety: who, exactly, is telling the truth here? Jef I. Richards, speaking as a professor rather than a hype merchant, puts his finger on the problem that sits beneath every banner ad, sponsored post, and “recommended for you” widget. “Credibility” isn’t a soft branding concern in his framing. It’s the missing infrastructure.

The intent is pointedly corrective. Richards isn’t arguing that digital ads are annoying; he’s arguing they’re unstable as persuasion because the medium evolved faster than its trust signals. In print or broadcast, credibility is partly borrowed from the container: the magazine’s masthead, the network’s standards, the reputational cost of being caught lying. Online, the container is often a faceless ad exchange, a pop-up landing page, or an influencer’s feed where the boundary between testimony and transaction can be deliberately blurred.

The subtext is that the industry has been optimizing the wrong things. Click-through rates and targeting precision are measurable and immediate, so they become the scorecard. Credibility is slower, harder to quantify, and devastating when ignored: once audiences feel tricked, they don’t just reject an ad; they downgrade the entire environment that served it. That’s not merely an ethical failure but a market failure.

Context matters here: Richards is gesturing toward an internet that matured on speed and scale, then had to retrofit legitimacy. Disclosure rules, verification badges, brand-safety tools, and anti-fraud systems are all belated attempts to answer his basic question: can online persuasion earn belief without borrowing it?