Once upon a time well a few yeas back to be precise, advertising agencies were factories. You gave them a brief, they churned out scripts, visuals, jingles. The cost was in the craft—the lights, the cameras, the battalions of account execs and creatives.
But then along came AI. Suddenly, everyone had a factory in their laptop. Need a video? Done in an afternoon. A headline? Five seconds. A hundred variations of a TikTok spot? Press a button.
Which leaves us with an awkward question: if anyone can make an ad, why pay an agency to make one?
The reflex answer “better craft” no longer holds. Craft is now abundant, instant, nearly free. The moat is gone. The castle is empty.
So where’s the new scarcity? It’s not in making. I believe that it is in choosing.
Taste. Strategy. Judgment. Signal from noise.
That is the agency’s future. Not as a factory, but as a curator.
Think of it this way: AI can give you 100 ads before lunch. Ninety-eight will be irrelevant. Two might be brilliant. The in-house client team will likely pick the wrong ninety-eight. Why? Because brands rarely see themselves clearly. They’re too close to the mirror.
Agencies, at their best, are editors of culture. They know which tensions to enter, which signals to amplify, which executions deserve media money and which deserve a swift burial.
This changes the economic model, too. Agencies shouldn’t sell hours or outputs. They should sell discernment. Maybe it’s a subscription to cultural intelligence. Maybe it’s royalties on ideas that go viral. Maybe it’s performance fees. But the days of charging for bulk production are numbered.
The factory is dying. And good riddance.
The curator is rising. Agencies that embrace this with the right talent will thrive, not by producing more content, but by ruthlessly deciding what deserves to exist.
Because in a world drowning in infinite bad irrelevant ads, the bravest act isn’t making another one. It’s having the taste, courage, and foresight to say: No. That doesn’t cut through. Kill it.
So here’s the final provocation: Do you want to be remembered as the brand that produced ads, or the one that edited culture?
A century ago, royal families held crowns. For some strange reason Kings and Queens still exist today, In a supposedly rational, democratic world, crowns should be relics, but the system keeps monarchs around because they make inherited power seem traditional rather than predatory !
But today we have also the new royals, about one hundred dynasties of families whose fortunes stretch across oil fields, banks, tech platforms, and retail empires wield a quieter, but no less absolute, power. They do not command armies. They command accountants, lawyers, lobbyists, and media empires. Their strength lies not in overthrowing governments but in reshaping them, invisibly, until entire nations mistake oligarchy for democracy.
The architecture of impunity Leaks from Panama,Paradise, and Pandora Papers made it clear: offshore secrecy is not a loophole. It is infrastructure. Law firms from Panama to Zurich, accountants in London, and banks in New York build mirrored worlds where money is both everywhere and nowhere. Ordinary citizens cannot enter. Politicians rarely challenge it, because their own campaigns depend on it.
The laundering of legitimacy Philanthropy is the modern confessional. A dynasty funds an art museum wing or a global health initiative. The donation wins headlines and tax write-offs. But the power remains untouched. Sometimes the very money that closed a hospital is recycled into the nameplate above its replacement wing.
The reckoning The TikTok video above of “ 100 families” is probably right in number and right in spirit. The truth is actually grimmer: about one hundred dynasties have captured democracy not with tanks, but with tax codes and shell companies. They have built an invisible crown, shared among them, passed silently from generation to generation and the whole planet, more than 8 billion people most of them living with scraps are OK with this.
So I have to ask: in a world where billionaires already play kings without crowns, why do we still bow to the ones who wear them? Why do we cheer for monarchs who inherit palaces while we inherit debt, precarity, and silence? Haven’t we had enough of crowns and dynasties, of bloodlines and backroom empires, of living as subjects instead of citizens? The pageantry is a distraction; the slavery is real. The time has come to wake up, tear off the invisible crown, and choose a future where no family, royal or billionaire, owns the destiny of billions. Maybe it is time for the 8 billion to wake up and claim the life they want.
We humans could have a bright future ahead of us that lasts billions of years. But we have to survive the next 200 years first. Join Josh Clark of Stuff You Should Know for a 10-episode deep dive that explores the future of humanity and finds dangers we have never encountered before lurking just ahead. And if we humans are alone in the universe, if we don’t survive intelligent life dies out with us too.
Advertising once worked like a well-planned dinner party. The strategist decided the seating plan, the topics of conversation, and when to change the subject. The creative lit the candles, poured the wine, and told the story that made the whole evening worth remembering.
Now the party has collapsed into chaos. The strategist is in the kitchen fiddling with soufflés. The creative is scribbling seating plans on napkins. And the machine, our shiny new sous-chef, has prepared twenty main courses at once, none of which anybody particularly wants to eat.
It looks lively. In truth it is cannibalism. Everyone is trespassing into everyone else’s garden. And when everyone does everything, nobody does anything well.
The strategist loses the depth of thinking that once made them valuable. The creative loses the craft that once made them indispensable. And the idea, the very heartbeat of advertising, is left without a clear owner.
The Result of the Collapse
For Agencies Agencies now resemble karaoke bars. Everyone is singing, but the tune is borrowed and the lyrics are hollow. The flood of AI-generated mockups dazzles in pitch rooms but collapses in the real world. Timelines do not accelerate because of efficiency but because confusion creates the illusion of speed.
Without role clarity, agencies drift into performance theatre. They produce mountains of content but little of it connects. They mistake volume for value. And as they try to be everything at once, they slowly become nothing in particular.
For Clients Clients are promised brilliance but delivered decoration. They receive work that looks like advertising but lacks the spine of strategy and the soul of creativity. They are drowned in outputs yet starved of ideas.
This confusion erodes trust. Clients cannot tell who to hold accountable. Was it the strategist, the creative, or the tool? In the absence of ownership, everything feels disposable. The brand pays the price in irrelevance, sameness, and wasted budgets.
Sooner or later, clients will stop seeing agencies as partners in meaning and memory. They will treat them as suppliers of cheap, forgettable content. Once you become a supplier instead of a partner, the game is already lost.
The Mirage of AI
The industry loves to blame AI. But AI did not kill creativity. It simply handed us a mirror.
AI is not the executioner. It is the accomplice. It exposes our professional insecurities with embarrassing clarity.
Strategists, anxious about irrelevance, spend hours fiddling with Midjourney prompts, writing their own scripts and slogans and call it “ideation.” Creatives, equally anxious, hide behind pseudo-intellectual decks and sprinkle jargon about “cultural tension” like salt on a bland meal. The machine obligingly produces endless outputs. All style, no spine.
The real problem is not the tool but the abdication of responsibility.
We have built an illusion of abundance. Agencies flaunt hundreds of mockups as though volume equals value. Clients nod approvingly, dazzled by the spectacle, only to wonder six months later why nothing shifted in the market. It is like serving twenty desserts while forgetting the main course.
Here lies the paradox. AI makes it easier than ever to generate what something might look like. But it does nothing to answer why it should exist at all. Without the “why,” the “what” is nothing more than decoration.
Once you mistake decoration for strategy, you are no longer an agency. You are a content farm with better lighting.
Who Owns the Idea?
This is the question we dare not ask. Who owns the idea now?
The Strategist Knows the market, the culture, the numbers. Can explain why something matters. But too often delivers skeletons without flesh.
The Creative Knows craft, taste, instinct. Can make an idea sing. But without direction risks producing viral fluff shareable, forgettable, meaningless.
The Machine Generates speed, scale, and surprise. Produces endless options in seconds. But cannot decide meaning. It has no skin in the game.
Today everyone points at everyone else, and the idea becomes orphaned. Nobody claims it, nobody defends it. And if nobody owns the idea, then nobody owns the outcome.
The Missing Role
What agencies need is not blurred roles but sharper ones. Someone must guard the idea. Someone must hold the “why” steady while the “how” evolves. Call them strategist, call them creative, call them lunatic it does not matter. But without a custodian of meaning, the machine will multiply nothing into infinity.
The great irony is that advertising was always about ownership. Someone had to stand in the room and say, “This is the idea. This is what we believe.” Without that moment, there is no risk, no courage, and no chance of resonance.
The danger of AI is not that it replaces us.
The danger is that it tempts us to replace ourselves. We confuse output for ideas, iteration for invention, role-swapping for collaboration.
We tell ourselves that cost-cutting justifies confusion. That speed justifies shallowness. That abundance justifies emptiness.
But every brand is built on memory, meaning, and commitment. And memory, meaning, and commitment do not emerge from machines. They come from people willing to own ideas.
So the question remains. Should we really let this continue just because it cuts costs?
“You all go into debt and you all hate each other ” Now you know!
Professor Jiang Xueqin delivers a chilling breakdown of how modern consumerism traps people in a cycle of comfort, obedience, and silent submission. From phones to fast fashion, you’re not choosing freely — you’re being managed. This isn’t freedom. It’s slavery perfected.
