Cameron ArmstrongI've been quiet on here lately.
Not because I ran out of things to say. The opposite. Things have been non stop, and in any spare moment I can make, I’ve been deep in building products and tools. The world is moving at a pace that's equal parts exciting and terrifying.
But something dropped over the weekend that I couldn't not share.
Display advertising hasn't changed since the 90s.
Banners. MPUs. Skyscrapers.
Rectangles that interrupt content because the web couldn't render anything else.
We've built an entire industry around making interruptions more efficient.
Programmatic made it faster to buy rectangles. DCO made it easier to fill rectangles. AI is now generating what goes inside rectangles.
Nobody stopped to ask: why are we still using rectangles?
Print understood something we forgot. The ad wasn't separate from the page. It was part of it. Text flowed around products. Layouts were designed, not templated.
Digital killed that. Not because it was a bad idea. Because the technology couldn't support it.
Until now…
Over the weekend, a developer released Pretext a GitHub repo which lets text flow around any shape. In real time. No performance hit.
Instead of articles surrounded by rectangles, you can now build pages like the best of print, visually stunning, with products sitting inside the content, text wrapping around images like a magazine spread.
I spent hours on Sunday evening building a website to see what's possible. The ideas are endless.
If you're a publisher, ad builder, or anyone who touches content on the web, this needs your attention. And with AI, anyone can build off the back of it right now, regardless of technical experience.
Take your head above water and remember: the media you buy and the creative you run are the most important levers of advertising effectiveness. Not audience IDs. Not efficiency.
This is what makes Pretext exciting. It puts advertising and content back on the right path, not chasing cheaper rectangles, but building something worth looking at.
See for yourself this website I built last night with a few examples. So many more places you could take this.
