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?
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?
AI was supposed to reinvent advertising. To make it intimate. Tailored. A whisper in your ear, not a billboard in your face.
Instead, most AI ads today feel like generic upscale animation slick, polished, but soulless. They don’t feel personal. They feel mass-produced and very similar to one another.
The illusion of personalization
Agencies love to say “personalization at scale.” What we’re really seeing is templating at scale. A character model reused, a background swapped, a few lines of text rotated. The result: ads that look identical across brands, categories, and countries. I can’t help wondering: are they actually selling the product, or just selling the illusion of innovation?
It’s creative déjà vu.
– Nearly 90% of advertisers are already using AI to make video ads (IAB, 2025). – Yet consumers aren’t fooled: NielsenIQ found many describe AI ads as “boring,” “annoying,” and “confusing” (Nielsen/OKO One, 2024).
If the promise was intimacy, the delivery feels like an overproduced screensaver.
The data proves what’s missing
When AI is used for real personalization, the results are different:
– MIT researchers (2025) found personalized AI video ads boosted engagement by 6–9 percentage points, while cutting production costs by 90%(MIT IDE, 2025). – Headway, an edtech startup, reported a 40% ROI increase after leaning into AI creative—but only because they combined speed with true audience tailoring (Business Insider, 2024).
The distinction is clear: personalized AI works. Generic AI doesn’t.
Template fatigue is the new banner blindness
We’ve replaced stock photography with stock animation. Banner blindness with template blindness. Ads that were supposed to see you instead blur into the feed.
And here’s the tragedy: the tech could do more. AI can adapt mood, context, culture, even language nuance. But right now, most agencies are chasing speed over meaning volume over resonance.
The fork in the road
The industry faces a choice:
– Keep churning out glossy, generic animations that look expensive but feel empty. – Or use AI as a scalpel cutting deeper into personalization, creating work that actually feels alive to the person watching.
Because if AI is just helping us produce better-looking wallpaper, then it’s not innovation. It’s stagnation with better rendering.
The supermarket is one of the strangest and most powerful inventions in human history. Grocery shopping is often perceived as a simple, mundane activity. And for many, access to food has never been more effortless. But supermarkets hold far more power than we realize. The journey our groceries take to reach the shelves touches every part of our lives – from our health, to our culture, to the environment.
For most of its history, advertising thrived on context.
Marlboro could posture as rugged freedom in the pages of Life.
Coca-Cola could sell happiness in the glow of a family television. Brands borrowed gravitas from the stage they performed on.
That stage has collapsed.
Open any feed, and the juxtapositions border on derangement. A luxury perfume ad sits next to footage from kids dyeing a war zone. A “get ready with me” makeup tutorial plays before a video of protesters clashing with police. A parody song about eugenics algorithms trends, while a new snack food launches in the same scroll. Luxury and suffering. Irony and sincerity. Progress and regression. All jostling for the same square of glass.
This is not culture. It is collision.
Algorithms, of course, insist they are solving the problem. They offer “personalization”. But what they actually know are the following: They know when you are restless, when you pause for three seconds on a video, when you hover over a product before abandoning it. They know your pulse. What they do not know is your soul. Why you can’t sleep, why you feel sad, why you are crying.
Prediction is not the same as understanding.
Machines are superb at exploiting moments of weakness—2am insomnia, doomscroll fatigue, payday jitters. Yet they cannot tell you why people yearn, what they aspire to, or what makes life meaningful. The industry has mistaken behavioural prediction for intimacy, and in doing so, has surrendered its one true advantage: the ability to craft enduring meaning.
This is advertising’s awkward dilemma. Do brands add more shards to the pile, fighting for a microsecond of fractured attention? Or do they resist the gravity of the feed and try to create coherence instead?
The uncomfortable truth is that advertising has become a contributor to the breakdown. By chasing “relevance” at all costs, brands pour gasoline on the chaos. Every campaign becomes another dissonant signal fighting for scraps of cognition.
Yet the opportunity is hiding in plain sight. In an environment where everything is noise, coherence becomes radical. In a feed where every signal contradicts the next, a brand that offers consistency, clarity, or even a moment of calm stands out far more than one that shouts louder.
Yesterday’s diagnosis was economic: loyalty is no longer earned, it is rented, renewed only as long as the offer makes sense. Today’s diagnosis is cultural: meaning itself has fragmented.
The future of advertising will not be won by algorithms alone, nor by nostalgia for heritage brands. It will be won by those who can do what machines cannot: give people a story that makes sense of the chaos.
The algorithm may know your pulse, but only humans can write your soul. The question for brands is brutally simple: do you want to feed the collapse—or carve coherence out of it?
WARC’sThe Future of Programmatic 2025 is a meticulously composed document. The charts are polished. The language is neutral. The predictions are framed as progress.
But read it closely and a deeper truth emerges: It’s not a report. It’s an autopsy. What’s dying is unpredictability. Creativity. Humanity. And we’re all expected to applaud as the corpse is carried off, sanitized and smiling.
We Are Optimizing Ourselves Into Irrelevance
Every year, programmatic becomes more “efficient.” More “targeted.” More “brand safe.” And with each incremental improvement, something irreplaceable is lost.
We’ve mistaken precision for persuasion. We’ve traded emotional impact for mechanical relevance. We’ve built a system that serves the spreadsheet, not the soul.
We didn’t refine advertising. We tamed it. And in doing so, we made it forgettable.
Curation Is Not a Strategy. It’s a Symptom.
Let’s stop pretending curation is innovation. It’s not. It’s fear management. It’s an escape hatch from a system that got too messy. We created an open marketplace—then panicked when it did what open things do: surprise us.
So we closed it.
We built private marketplaces, multi-publisher deals, curated “quality” impressions. And we congratulated ourselves for regaining control. But in truth, we just shrank the canvas. The reach is cleaner, sure. But the resonance is gone.
Personalization Has Become a Prison
We’re shown what the machine thinks we want—again and again—until novelty disappears. We call it relevance, but what it really is… is confinement. When every ad is customized to our past behavior, we stop growing. We stop discovering. We become static reflections of data points.
We aren’t advertising to humans anymore. We’re advertising to ghosts of their former selves.
AI Isn’t Making Ads Safer. It’s Making Them Invisible.
The report praises AI for enhancing brand safety. But here’s the problem no one wants to name: AI doesn’t understand context. It understands keywords, sentiment scores, and statistical tone. So entire stories, entire voices, entire truths are algorithmically scrubbed out—because the machine can’t read between the lines.
It’s not safety. It’s sanitization. It’s censorship with a dashboard.
It’s flawed. It’s physical. It’s not entirely measurable. And because of that—it still has soul.
It reminds us that real advertising doesn’t beg for clicks. It stops you mid-step. It lingers in your head hours later, uninvited.
The Real Threat Isn’t Bad Ads. It’s Forgettable Ones.
We keep polishing the system, but forget why the system existed in the first place. Advertising isn’t a math problem. It’s a cultural force. A punchline. A provocation. A seduction. A story. And we’ve allowed it to become… efficient.
That should terrify us.
Because efficient ads don’t change minds. Efficient ads don’t start movements. Efficient ads don’t get remembered.
Only real ones do. Messy. Emotional. Imperfect. Human.
In Case You Skimmed, Read This:
Curation isn’t strategy. It’s shrinkage.
AI brand safety is quiet censorship.
Personalization killed surprise.
The future of programmatic isn’t what’s next—it’s what’s left.
We didn’t lose the plot. We wrote it out of the story. Stay Curious
