The Factory Dies, The Curator Rises

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?

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Luxury Has No Soul If It’s Printed by a Machine

Why AI-Generated Ads Are Killing the One Thing Money Can’t Buy: Meaning

There is something unsettling about watching a machine try to seduce you.

It can generate images of silk, gold, and bone structure so symmetrical it feels divine. It can mimic opulence with terrifying precision. But you walk away cold. Not because it wasn’t beautiful—but because no one bled for it.

Luxury, at its core, is not a product. It is a performance of care. A theater of intention. A whisper that says: “Someone made this. And they made it for you.”

That whisper dies the moment a brand discloses: This ad was generated by AI.

And consumers—instinctively, almost viscerally—pull back.

This isn’t speculation. In March 2025, researchers at Tarleton University’s Sam Pack College of Business conducted a series of experiments that lifted the veil on AI in luxury advertising.

They found that when people were told an ad was AI-generated, their perception of the brand soured—even if the ad itself was flawless. It wasn’t the aesthetics that offended. It was the implication that no human effort was involved. No obsession. No sleepless nights. Just pixels, puppeteered by code.

Because in luxury, effort is the aura. You’re not buying the bag, the scent, the silk—you’re buying the story of the hands that made it.

“Luxury without labor is just a JPEG with a price tag.”

AI doesn’t yearn. It doesn’t dream. It doesn’t understand what it means to long for something across a lifetime and finally touch it. And so when it speaks the language of luxury, it sounds like a tourist repeating poetry phonetically. The form is there. But the soul is missing.

In the same study, researchers found something else. When AI-generated visuals were truly original—surreal, impossible, avant-garde—the backlash weakened. Consumers were more forgiving when the machine dared to be weird, not just perfect. Novelty redeemed automation. Why? Because it felt like art, not optimization.

This is the thin line AI must walk: between mimicry and magic. Between replication and revelation.

What brands must now realize is this: you can’t fake the sacred.

You can’t outsource reverence. Not when your entire mythology is built on the illusion of effort, exclusivity, and the impossible-to-scale. When luxury becomes scalable, it becomes ordinary. And nothing kills desire faster than convenience.

The real scandal isn’t that AI is being used. It’s how cheaply it’s being used.
Not as a collaborator in creation—but as a replacement for it.

“We don’t fall in love with perfection—we fall in love with presence.”

So what now? Must we banish AI from the house of beauty?

No. But it must be tamed. Not in the name of nostalgia, but in the name of mystery.

Let it enhance the myth—not expose the machinery. Let it generate visions too strange for human hands—but never let it erase the hands entirely. Let it serve the story—not become the storyteller.

Use it to deepen the dream. Not to save on production costs.