Design

The Brief

The comfortable read is that demand is strong and getting stronger — record spending intent, carriers expanding capacity, experiential budgets outpacing goods. The more uncomfortable read sits one layer down: nearly every signal is also a story about control migrating away from generic matching. The supply growing fastest is the kind that resists price comparison, the visibility that matters most is the kind suppliers can expose directly, the design leverage is moving beneath the interface where an aggregator has never operated, and even marketing is being rebuilt around owned, attributable channels rather than rented reach. Aggregating cheap supply for price-sensitive demand was always the commodity layer — and it is the layer these shifts quietly erode. When demand is this healthy, the question worth sitting with is whether the instinct should be to ride it, or to use the cover it provides to move up into the parts of the journey that won't commoditize.