At our Advertising Town Hall, I presented a deep dive on AI’s impact on advertising the INMA team recapped here (you can still get access by registering to watch the replay here.) 

The headline: This is the most consequential and transformative media, tech, and advertising evolution of our lifetime — and we're just at the beginning. I urged attendees to think of AI as both a new Internet and a new operating system — an infrastructure-level shift that will redefine how advertising is created, delivered, and measured.

But while AI is the most transformative technology of our time, I believe the complexities of implementation are underestimated and often poorly understood. And we are heading for a correction.

What we’re seeing is a clash between optimistic visions and the reality of technical adoption, process integration, and change management. Further, as we’ve seen with everything from browsers to operating systems to e-commerce and social networks, early leaders in the AI race may not be the long-term winners.

AI is forcing us to ask deep and existential questions about the long-term viability and value of human creativity, art, ideas, and expression. Can AI have ideas or is it merely a regurgitation of our collective past? 

These are really deep questions we’re exploring as a society. But when it comes to advertising, does it even matter? A DVJ Insights study compared responses to AI-generated and human-generated ads and found no significant difference across metrics unless viewers identified an ad as AI-generated, in which case they ranked the ads lower. 

The catch? They frequently guessed wrong. People are already struggling to tell the difference.

I shared two examples: a TV ad for Kalshi was created by one person in two days for just US$2,000, while Coca-Cola’s 2025 holiday campaign was produced in one month instead of one year using five AI specialists and 70,000 video clips.

Still, high-end production companies report AI alone doesn’t work yet (a headline that could apply to the technology more broadly). AI can’t make micro-adjustments or deliver final image quality at traditional levels, so hybrid workflows are emerging.

In the programmatic space, AI is poised to disrupt the middle layers — SSPs, DSPs, trading desks — by enabling direct buyer-seller relationships, and we’re seeing the structure of all of this starting to emerge.

I called this “agentic infrastructure development,” pointing to pilots at Yahoo and new agentic protocols emerging across the ecosystem. As I said in my newsletter a few weeks ago, these protocols are too early to mandate, too uncertain to predict, but also too significant to ignore.

Meanwhile, AI is triggering dramatic restructuring in the agency world. Brands like GM are bringing strategy in-house and consolidating creative across AI-specialised agencies. Publicis is thriving by using AI in pitches — including winning Coca-Cola away from WPP. The traditional full-time creative services model is under pressure: Big agencies are morphing into data companies, while smaller ones become service extensions for brands.

And last, AI is evolving measurement significantly. We’re seeing the rapid adoption of Marketing Mix Modeling across the marketing and advertising industry, a technology that was previously too cumbersome, slow and expensive for all but the largest brands, but which AI is now democratizing. And given the rise of fragmentation and the absence of better ways to analyse spend, it’s filling a long-standing need for visibility and insight.

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