๐ง๐ต๐ฒ โ๐ฐ๐ผ๐ฐ๐ธ๐ฟ๐ผ๐ฎ๐ฐ๐ต๐ฒ๐โ ๐ผ๐ณ ๐๐ฎ๐ป๐ป๐ฒ๐ ๐บ๐ถ๐ด๐ต๐ ๐ฏ๐ฒ ๐๐ต๐ฒ ๐๐บ๐ฎ๐ฟ๐๐ฒ๐๐ ๐๐๐ฟ๐๐ถ๐๐ผ๐ฟ๐ ๐ถ๐ป ๐ฏ๐๐๐ถ๐ป๐ฒ๐๐
With the rosรฉ-fuelled creative fest in Cannes wrapping up today, Iโve been reflecting on how often the ad industry has been declared dead.
Iโve spent much of my career in advertising. ย And Iโve lost count of the supposed extinction events weโve survived.
The internet. Programmatic. Social media. Privacy regulations. In-house studios.
Each time, we adapted. And in many cases, my agencies have been on at the front of the charge, turning disruption into growth.
Now itโs AIโs turn to kill us off.
And yetโฆ here the cockroaches were this week. Rosรฉ in hand, poolside in Cannes, debating prompts and prompting debates.
Then The Economist landed in my inbox with a piece that mirrored what Iโve been thinking. It offered three sharp lessons from adland โ lessons other industries would do well to pay attention to:
๐น AI is eating the middle, not the top.
LLMs already do a solid job of the โgood enoughโ marketing that keeps the industry running. Thatโs most of what brands rely on. And most of what agencies deliver. Itโs being automated faster than weโd like to admit.
๐น The big players are pulling away.
We love the story that AI levels the playing field. But in practice, scale wins. Compute, data, distribution. ย Itโs all for sale. Intelligence isnโt being democratised. Itโs being bought.
๐น Everything old is new again.
Billboards and PR are back. not because theyโre trendy, but because AI has changed how we track what works. Attribution is now data science, not guesswork.
But hereโs the bit that matters for agency and marketing leaders:
AI isnโt just a tech trend. Itโs exposing three deeper challenges. And we canโt automate our way out of them:
๐ธ 1. The business model is broken.
The headcount and timesheet model doesnโt hold when machines can do middle-tier work faster and cheaper.
Clients want strange, sharp, standout. And they want it fast.
We need new economics, not just new tools.
๐ธ 2. The centre is collapsing.
Mid-tier roles, work, and agencies are getting squeezed.
Value is shifting to the extremes: automated at one end, deeply human at the other.
Successful agencies will move to the edges.
๐ธ 3. Creativity needs redefining.
If AI handles the functional 95%, the weird and wonderful 5% just became priceless.
That demands a reframe: from service providers to cultural stewards and business partners.
We canโt out-machine the machines. But we can out-human them.
In my coaching and consulting work, Iโm seeing whoโs adapting โ and whoโs clinging to familiar ground.
The ones who survive?
Theyโre the ones who keep moving.
Like cockroaches.
(And I say that with love.)