Businesses can’t get enough of artificial intelligence. From drafting emails to creating business strategy, AI has increasingly infiltrated the professional ecosystem in the past year, completing in seconds jobs that would have taken a traditional human worker hours. Because of AI, spheres that once seemed untouchable by mechanization, like branding, marketing and communications, are now facing uncertainty about their place in the future.
While these industries are struggling to find words, others are speaking for them. Mark Zuckerberg recently made it clear that tech’s vision for the near-future is one where ads are fully written, designed and produced by machines, not humans. All that clients need is a bank account; Meta’s AI will handle the rest. We’re approaching a future where autonomously-generated ads essentially write themselves in real time, tailoring their output to the human on the other side of the screen based on digital geolocators and media history. This is the goal that Meta and other major platforms like Google are rapidly building towards.
The scale and precision that AI empowers might seem like an end for agencies. However, as AI takes over the mechanics of digital marketing, demonstrating the real value of human creativity, emotional storytelling and brand-building becomes imperative.
If AI is going to own execution, agencies have to own meaning, and that requires rediscovering the one thing that AI can’t automate: human connection.
Our History: Slowly, and Then All At Once
Amidst the uncertainty, it can be tempting to cling to the status quo; but agencies have always evolved to meet the moment. In the Mad Men era, it was all about the big idea: TV spots, radio jingles and eye-catching print. Change came not in the blink of an eye, but in the dial-up of the first personal computers. Agencies committed themselves to the vanguard of the Digital Age with the dot-com boom of the ‘90s, and new metrics and targeting secured opportunities for specialization that had never been possible before. Advertisements like Volkswagen’s highly interactive digital banners and BMW’s turn-of-the-century short film series, which was produced specifically for internet consumption, took new, innovative approaches to customer engagement.
As the 2000s turned into the 2010s, content creation exploded, emphasizing a more-is-more mentality. Impact became tangible with impressions, clicks and conversions. Clients became used to seeing every data point, and return on investment became an industrial-sized North Star. Campaigns were by the numbers, driven by data rather than design. But with all eyes on metrics, we lost sight of the building blocks of real brand connection: ingenuity, risk and play.
What We Lose When Everything Becomes “Optimized”
Brand loyalty has seen a marked decay, and it’s been replaced by a race to the bottom to trigger the next impulse buy. Through a combination of impersonal ads, lowest-common-denominator storytelling, the rise of influencers and the distrust of AI, consumers don’t see advertising or brands in the way they used to.
The AI boom doesn’t just enable a mass increase in “AI Slop” content; it utilizes unprecedented numbers of data to algorithmically optimize for clicks and short-term engagement. Companies like Zeta can build audiences across platforms using troves of behavioral data, making Meta, Google and others even more target-accurate and absorbing the agency’s role into the platform itself.
In a struggle over content, this feels like the protective shield companies have been waiting for. But the reality is that automation is a double-edged sword. Brands have been flattened into the two dimensions of a phone screen, and the declining brand loyalty in younger generations shows that this isn’t sustainable. Customer interaction, just like the artificial appeal that generated it, becomes temporary and shallow. Much of the time, they’re in it for the product more than the brand.
AI enters this landscape at an interesting moment. It can manipulate attention. But it can’t create affinity. That’s a different game.
The Path Forward: Human Creativity as the Competitive Advantage
As AI becomes the engine behind more and more of the advertising ecosystem, agencies face a choice: try to keep up, or change the game.
Trying to outperform AI platforms is a losing battle. They’ll always be cheaper, faster and more scalable. The AI-driven ad economy rewards the highest spenders with clicks, but that kind of short-term thinking erodes trust and weakens brands over time. Instead of playing the game, agencies need to double down on what made them valuable from the start: original storytelling, emotional resonance and big creative bets.
Funneling resources into AI ads gets companies exactly what they paid for: client relationships that last as long as it takes to click “place order.” But building a brand takes more than a single purchase. Creating a brand is about identity and connection, something that AI does not and cannot replicate. Building brand depth is about fostering lasting relationships. And sometimes that means customers repping a local gas station or fast food chain like it’s a sports team (see Buc-ee’s in the South, Wawa in the Mid-Atlantic, Dunkin in New England).
AI can capture attention in the moment, but it takes humans to build something worth returning to again and again. When every ad is optimized for the click, we risk losing what makes brands memorable. Personal connection may take longer to create, but it’s what turns transactions into trust, and consumerism into culture.
