The current wave of Artificial Intelligence (respectively generative AI) is reshaping the marketing landscape, setting the stage for what is anticipated to be a fundamentally more creative advertising revolution than the last shift, when digital marketing emerged. Will all be doomed as AI will take over fundamental roles and tasks in current agency and marketing setups or will this be a boost for the current stakeholder that are willing to adapt fast?
The Democratization of Creative Power
A key position underpinning the current revolution is that AI puts the means of production into the hands of the people with the ideas – the creatives. While the previous marketing revolution, the digital one, was centered on media and technology, this era is about democratizing the ad creative itself. The shift in focus to creative is profound, impacting every part of the marketing industry
In the digital revolution, creatives often played only minor roles or stood skeptically on the sidelines. This relative absence, it is argued, may have worsened lingering problems such as ad clutter, ugly ads, hyperbole surrounding hyper-personalization, and an incorrect balance between short-term ‘performance’ and long-term brand building. This time, however, progressive creative people are playing a major, shaping role right from the start. Examples include professionals like the Dor Brothers, who have produced hundreds of AI videos, including commercials that have amassed over 100 million views, alongside hundreds of commissioned professionals and thousands of amateurs who are beginning to monetize AI video creation.
Furthermore, many of the technology companies leading the charge, such as Google and Runway, are developing their technology hand in hand with creative individuals, testing and developing the tools with creators from the outset. These companies are leaning heavily into content creation, unlike the leaders of the digital revolution who largely viewed themselves as neutral distribution platforms. Innovations like Google DeepMind’s Genie 3, which generates dynamic worlds navigable in real-time from a text prompt, and the image model Nano Banana (aka Gemini 2.5 Flash Image), built to offer creatives greater control, illustrate this deep collaboration.
This accessibility completes a cycle started by the digital revolution. The previous revolution lowered the barrier to buying ads, making media space available to millions of tiny companies. However, content creation still required hiring individuals, agencies, or production companies. Now, the GenAI revolution offers those same small companies access to professional-quality video and other content for the first time
Accelerated Brand Building and Efficiency
The AI revolution is not just for smaller players. The very biggest marketers are capitalizing on vastly more cost-effective content production. Unilever, for instance, is constructing a ‘Beauty AI Studio’—an in-house system utilizing Brandtech Group’s AI platform to create assets for various digital channels for major brands like Dove and Vaseline across many markets.
A significant contrast with the digital revolution is the rapid inclusion of video and upper-funnel activities. In the previous iteration, new advertising technologies initially proved themselves primarily at the bottom of the funnel, with brand-building advertising (video and social) following much later. This time, video is present almost immediately. Because brand-building advertising quickly follows where video is available, this revolution is poised to democratize content production that works across the full funnel from the outset, moving up the funnel far more rapidly than before. Believers in brand building should be excited by the opening up of creative tools that aid companies of all sizes in brand development
Major global advertisers are engaging with AI technology to drive efficiency without lowering their brand standards. For example, Diageo announced its use of AI to drive efficiency in its £2.7bn marketing budget.
Navigating the Quality Divide and “AI Slop”
While there is a widespread concern that “AI slop”, poor-quality AI content, will take over the internet, it is argued that human audiences are naturally discerning and will punish poor quality with lack of attention, causing algorithms to penalize it. Furthermore, creative content focused on human audiences will rapidly improve as the underlying tools advance. The industry’s goal, reflecting Sturgeon’s law (90% of everything is usually substandard), should be to focus on producing the top 5% to 10% of creative content, leaving the rest to amateurs.
The quality of AI-generated video and imagery is advancing quickly, nearing a point where AI video is no longer obviously distinguishable as such. Critiques regarding quality must now be nuanced and technical. When the best AI ads are tested on human audiences, they rarely notice the AI origin, though professionals currently often can. It is suspected that soon, most professionals will be unable to tell either.
The perceived decline in quality is often based on the output from tiny, experimental companies who may never have advertised before and are happy to push out content that differs dramatically from what large companies approve. However, the AI video quality major companies are utilizing shows no sign of reduction.
The Enduring Need for Human Creativity and Direction
The crucial ongoing debate is whether AI can ever be truly creative, moving beyond execution and production to generate genuine, strong creative ideas. While some argue AI only delivers derivative work devoid of human emotion, others point out that combining existing things and ideas—which AI excels at—is precisely what creativity often entails
While AI is not yet autonomously generating breakthrough ideas it is incredibly useful for creative people to enhance, execute, and produce their ideas faster and at a greater scale. AI’s ability to generate numerous ideas and iterate quickly offers a potential solution to the historical difficulty of scaling creativity.
Crucially, the notion that GenAI offers instant creative ideas that magically appear without a brief, strategy, budget, or—most bizarrely—without creative people is a myth. Research, such as an industry-wide exercise studying the creative potential of LLMs led by Springboards AI, suggests that while models like Gemini and Claude may outperform ChatGPT in generating a range of ideas, they still produce results that are often “too samey”. A key finding is that models still require ‘humans in the loop’ to select the strongest ideas; human creative direction remains necessary for the foreseeable future
The GenAI revolution will likely reduce the total number of certain classic creative roles, accelerating changes already underway. However, the technology is also creating “loads more new types of creative roles”. Existing professionals are adapting: video producers are becoming AI video makers, and copywriters are becoming AI copy strategists. They are not allowing the technology to autonomously perform their jobs but are embracing tools to collaborate, working faster and smarter than before.
Ultimately, creativity is deemed far too powerful and innate a human instinct to be killed by AI, and far too valuable for businesses seeking a competitive edge. While premium brands may occasionally choose traditionally made creative content as a costly signaling mechanism, the middle market will become challenging for those adhering only to traditional production methods. The future of marketing creativity, which businesses will source from the most effective and efficient place, is confidently predicted to be a combination of people and AI.
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