You buy a coat from a Northern Quarter boutique online. Done. Sorted. But for the next three weeks, every website you visit is absolutely convinced you’re still coat shopping. Meanwhile, that same boutique has no idea why their ad spend keeps climbing while actual sales stay flat.

Sound familiar? It’s not just you — and it’s not just a quirky internet glitch. There’s a name for what’s happening, and a Manchester-based marketing expert reckons most businesses here haven’t clocked it yet.

Kris Irizawa, COO of integrated marketing consultancy E-Boost Consulting, calls it the signal crisis. And it’s quietly reshaping how the internet works — for shoppers and businesses alike.

The Internet Runs on Clues

Behind every ad, every product recommendation, every suspiciously well-timed offer, there’s a data trail. Marketers call them signals — basically digital breadcrumbs. The page you visited, the item you hovered over, your location, your device. For years, companies stitched these breadcrumbs into detailed profiles using tracking cookies, then used those profiles to decide what you’d see online.

Here’s the thing: those profiles are now falling apart.

Privacy rules have tightened. Apple blocks cross-app tracking. Safari and Firefox kill most cookies by default. Even Google’s pulling back on what advertisers can collect. All of it, broadly speaking, good for consumers. But it’s created a mess inside the marketing industry that nobody’s talking about loudly enough.

“These changes were designed to protect user privacy, and that’s generally a good thing,” says Kris. “But they’ve also created something inside the marketing industry that people rarely talk about: a growing signal crisis.”

When the Map Goes Wrong

The AI systems running online advertising haven’t slowed down — they still make millions of decisions per second about what you see. They’ve just started making those decisions with worse information. Adverity reported in 2025 that up to 45% of data companies use for marketing is incomplete, outdated, or just wrong.

“Imagine trying to drive through rush-hour traffic using a GPS that’s missing half the roads,” Kris says. “You’ll still get directions; they just won’t always make sense.”

Think about that on a Manchester commute. Piccadilly Gardens to Salford Quays with half the streets missing. You’d still arrive somewhere. Just probably not where you meant to go.

When data gaps appear, algorithms don’t pause. They guess. Cleared your cookies? Sharing a device with your partner? Browsed privately on the work laptop? To the system, that’s just a probability problem to solve — and it solves it by filling the gaps with whatever pattern seems closest. That’s why you get ads for things you already bought, or recommendations that feel completely random.

Not malicious. Just wrong.

It Hits Businesses Hard Too

For shops along Deansgate, agencies in MediaCityUK, or any Manchester business running digital campaigns, the signal crisis creates a specific headache: they can’t accurately measure what’s actually working.

“In the past, businesses could track fairly precisely which ad led to a purchase,” says Kris. “Today, much of that tracking is broken or incomplete, so instead of direct measurement, companies increasingly rely on statistical modeling — essentially educated guesses — about which marketing channels deserve credit.”

Flawed models mean money flows to the wrong places. And consumers end up seeing the same ads, over and over, across every platform — because the system keeps doubling down on its wrong assumptions.

There’s a knock-on effect beyond annoyance, too. Research flagged in a 2023 survey found that 91% of consumers won’t buy from brands that serve ads they experience as intrusive. The “creepiness factor” — that unsettling moment when you can’t work out how a company knows something about you — tanks trust fast.

So businesses spend more, reach people less effectively, and erode the goodwill they needed in the first place. Not exactly a winning formula.

What Actually Needs to Shift

“Most people don’t know the term signal crisis,” Kris admits, “but they’re living with its effects every time they open a browser or scroll through an app.”

The fix isn’t just better AI. It’s a different approach to the relationship between companies and customers — something Manchester’s business community, with its straight-talking reputation, is arguably well-placed to lead on. That means collecting data with clear consent, building direct relationships instead of chasing third-party tracking, rethinking how success gets measured, and applying human judgment rather than blindly trusting automated systems.

“Privacy protections aren’t the problem,” concludes Kris. “The real challenge is that the digital economy is still adapting to a world where data is harder to collect and harder to interpret.”

The algorithms will keep guessing. The question is whether businesses here start giving them better information — or keep wondering why the ads aren’t working.