Growth Ritual #71
📋 IN THIS ISSUE: Beyond Creativity: How AI is Reshaping Advertising Agencies
Beyond Creativity: How AI is Reshaping Advertising Agencies
Last week, I had the opportunity to speak at the inaugural TBWAI event, organized by TBWA\Istanbul.
They envisioned TBWAI as a series of periodic gatherings designed to explore new ideas, artists, and ventures emerging from the intersection of creativity and artificial intelligence. And it truly delivered on that vision. It was one of the most enriching events I've attended.
The first presentation of this initial gathering was dedicated to Next Big App. We had an incredibly sharp audience who listened intently to our work, asking insightful questions. It was a fantastic feeling.
The main theme of both my talk there and my previous newsletter was about how companies can survive the dizzying pace of change brought by artificial intelligence (See: Growth Ritual #70).
In issue #70, I elaborate on this idea, but to summarize again: I believe large, established advertising agencies should now act as “Technology Curators”, effortlessly facilitating innovation for their client brands by connecting them with the right technology startups.
These gatherings organized by TBWA demonstrate that they've already begun to embrace this “Technology Curator” role.
This and similar situations perfectly summarize a major transformation happening in the advertising world that can no longer be ignored: Artificial intelligence is rewriting the script of the advertising game.
The Balance of Power Shifts: Tech Giants vs. Creative Agencies
Even at events like the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, AI is now "the elephant in the room". As discussed in an article published in The Economist, everything in the advertising industry is about to be turned upside down.
AI tools developed by tech giants like Google, Amazon, and Meta can generate advertisements in seconds. You upload data such as customer demographics and purchase history into the system, and out comes a ready-to-deploy video, banner, or social media content.
This situation is truly shaking up the industry's balance of power. The large, established creative agencies whose charismatic figures and incredibly clever campaigns we admired while watching Mad Men now have to compete with an insatiable, always-on, supercomputer that's quick with answers.
In a world where more than half of global advertising spend flows to these tech giants, agencies need to do more than just “creative work”.
The Agency of the Future: The Intersection of Creativity and Curation
The rise of artificial intelligence doesn't signal the end of creativity. On the contrary, it's redefining what creativity means. When GymNation's CMO enthusiastically described on CNBC how they optimized their campaigns using AI, achieving better results than traditional agency work, it felt like a flare signaling a coming paradigm shift for the entire industry.
It's clear now: the successful agencies of the future will be those that view AI not as a competitor, but as a tool.
A hybrid model where AI handles mundane tasks like data analysis and draft creation, while humans focus on the big picture, strategy, and that unique "human" spark reflecting the brand's essence, seems to be the approach we'll be discussing more.
This is precisely what TBWA\Istanbul is doing with its TBWAI event. They're moving beyond simply "making ads" and embracing a curator role, guiding their clients through the tech world, selecting and presenting the most relevant innovations for them.
Ultimately, while AI is rewriting the script for advertising, new players are being sought for the leading role. This role won't be filled by those who view technology as a threat and stand by idly, but by agencies that simplify complexity for their clients, make the future actionable for them, and most importantly, act as a trusted Technology Curator.
Let’s continue exploring brief glimpses into the future for the advertising industry.
Zip-Ads: 0.3-Second "Micro-Dreams"
What it is: EEG studies (MIT, 2023) have proven that the brain can unconsciously process a visual image below the threshold of conscious perception—approximately 300 ms. AI-powered creatives now call this threshold "Zip-Ad": single-frame or 3-4 frame advertising flashes.
Why it's important: The brand image is imprinted on the limbic system before the viewer even consciously registers "I saw an ad." What's more, ad-blockers can't detect these 300 ms streams.
Prediction: By 2026, 12% of CPG brands will begin testing Zip-Ads in TikTok or Reels feeds.
Synthetic Nostalgia: Selling False Memories, Not the Future
With Stable Diffusion v3, "historical style-transfer" is now instantaneous. Brands are marketing products that never existed during a customer's childhood, embedded within 'old VHS-style commercials.'
Pepsi's R&D team is piloting the "Remember-Me Engine," which takes a user's birth year and pop-culture metadata to generate synthetic memories, creating the feeling of "I drank this in the summer of 1997."
Ethical Bomb: The line of manipulation is crossed when an individual cannot differentiate between a 'nostalgic experience' and a genuine memory. The EU AI Act will open discussions on this technique, labeled "memory hacking," in 2025.
The Advertiser's CRISPR: "Creative DNA" Mutation
Artificial intelligence reads a campaign's text and structure like a code sequence. Metaphor density, rhythm, humorous deviation, etc., are considered "nucleotides" and written into a library.
When the next brief arrives, the model uses these previous "DNA chains," cutting and pasting like CRISPR, to generate entirely new ideas that still maintain the brand's tone without mutation.
WPP's clandestine "GenePool" platform has sequenced 1.4 million commercials; creative directors are now asking, "Do you have the 1950s comedy gene + the 2010s empowerment gene on hand?"
Reverse A/B Testing: "Find the Loser First"
In classic A/B logic, we select the best. Amazon's AI (Code-name: Nebula) first intentionally generates and releases poor variants into the market, mapping the viewer's reaction threshold.
Then, an improvement cycle runs. The final version delivers over 27% ROI above the norm, creating a "my expectations were low, I'm surprised" effect on the viewer.
This is the first advertising model to make psychological contrast bias scalable; its patent will become public by the end of 2024.
Edge-GPU Billboards: AI Renders Instantly in Outdoor Spaces
5G + NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orion cards are now directly embedded into LED panels.
License plates of cars at traffic lights, weather conditions, and Spotify song data are read → AI renders a new commercial in 3-4 seconds in the background and cycles it through.
In the pilot of Paris's LeTriangle project, one billboard displayed 17,600 unique creatives in a single day. Studio rendering hours = 0.
Emotion as a Service (EaaS): The New Ad Offering
Advertising is no longer about singular content; it's about selling hormonal state packages. The combination of Amazon Halo and OpenAI API sends out "Dopamine Pack"-themed audio ads when your stress-cortisol levels drop.
Spotify, with its "Mood-SDK," has opened up 8,000 emotional presets to brands across the "joy-workout-calm-grief" spectrum. When a 6-8 word audio layer is added on top of music, purchase intent jumps by 34%.
Negative Auction: Paying to Not See Ads
A reversed version of Brave browser's Basic Attention Token (BAT) model is in its testing phase: Users pay micro-crypto to avoid seeing an ad.
Advertisers analyze "missed impression" data to derive a hatred-avoidance matrix: Which colors, words, or tones push people to pay to avoid them? This data is then used to create "anti-hooks" (the opposite of positive resonance) in the next campaign.
"Post-Mortem" Persona Advertising
Deepfake post-mortem agencies (like Re;memory, HereAfter AI) are packaging licensing deals to use digital clones of celebrities in advertisements up to seven years after their death.
A draft proposal that emerged at the 2024 Cannes Privacy Forum sparked debate: Should the "Post-Mortem Endorsement Window" (PMEW) be limited to 10 years?
When a perfume ad featuring Marilyn Monroe, never filmed in 1953, is released for the first time in 2027, it will give birth to the "cultural time travel" format.
Even Shorter Takes
Ad Copy = Code: Prompt engineering is the new grammar of creative work. Copywriters will be writing "prompts" as much as "copy."
Democratization of Personalized Video: You won't watch the same ad on YouTube; versions will flow that change instantly based on everything from your facial expressions to the weather.
Synthetic Influencer Explosion: Lil Miquela was just the trailer. Brands will turn to virtual faces with near-zero copyright and crisis risk.
Voice Search and Conversational Shopping: Alexa, Siri, and ChatGPT voice assistants will generate more "voice reminders" than brand jingles. VEO (Voice Engine Optimization) is being added alongside SEM.
2040: Advertising Dystopia or Utopia?
Let's accelerate a bit. Buckle up; some of these lines might sound like a Black Mirror script, but they're all derived from ideas currently awaiting patents.
Neuro-Barter Economy
Utopia: People watch ads via a "neuro-patch" affixed to their brains and earn free health insurance. The patch regulates alpha-beta waves, reducing chronic anxiety by 28%, a figure confirmed by WHO data.
Dystopia: Low-income households are forced into 4 hours of "sponsored sleep" daily to avoid losing their insurance. Brand jingles infiltrate collective dreams: you wake up in the morning humming a Coca-Cola song with no recollection why.
A 2034 draft of the "Mind-Share Act" attempts to limit weekly maximum ad-dream duration to 90 minutes.
Algorithmic Radicalization Agencies
Utopia: Patagonia and WWF purchase a "green radicalization model" that triggers carbon-negative behaviors. AI motivates individuals to reduce their waste by 60% in six months, significantly lowering urban waste loads.
Dystopia: Using the same infrastructure, political dark-PACs identify "enemy brand" sympathizers and produce micro-humiliation videos. In the 2040 US elections, voting intent in one state is made as "shameful" as using a rival brand.
Synthetic Reputation Institutes
Utopia: Reputation-as-a-Service platforms can reverse wrongful lynchings within 48 hours using AI; misinformation is swiftly debunked.
Dystopia: The same service sells "personalized justified lynching" packages: generating 40 TB of fake evidence capable of ending your ex's career with two tweets. Advertisers create invisible black campaigns to deliberately raise the "reputation insurance" premiums of rival influencers.
DNA-Based Segmentation
Utopia: Thanks to anonymized genetic profiling, sugar alternatives are advertised to audiences prone to diabetes, increasing healthy living scores.
Dystopia: In 2038, a fast-food giant targets the "high dopamine receptor density" gene, directing individuals with low addiction thresholds to unlimited menus until morning. Insurance companies raise policy prices by 70% for users tagged with "high-risk consumption"—consumption behavior transforms into health penalties.
Community Simulations (Shadow Societies)
Utopia: Universities conduct advertising experiments on "synthetic societies" of 10 million people, reducing real-world side effects to zero; toxic body-shaming content is filtered before it even hits the market.
Dystopia: Brands manipulate their "shadow societies" to discover meme flows that will create obsessions in real society. The algorithm is fed until real user behavior is pulled towards the optimum score in the simulation: society is forced to conform to its 1:1 marketing model.
Emotional Weather Control
Utopia: City-based "affective meteorology" panels project serotonin-boosting color and sound waves in the morning hours; suicide rates drop by 12%.
Dystopia: A major retail chain broadcasts a melancholic filter on rainy days, increasing "comfort food" sales by 40%. Society begins to live its mood according to brand promotion calendars; companies even decide "which day we'll be happy."
3 Macro Outcomes
Inequality Multiplies: Ad exposure = Income model. The gap between those "forced to see ads" and those "paying not to see them" widens.
Erosion of Cultural Reality: The combination of deepfakes and shadow societies collapses the concept of "shared memory"; even the past becomes A/B test data.
Emotional Sovereignty: Algorithms colonize not just wallets but also the emotional climate; politics, art, and personal relationships evolve according to this new climate.
Final Word
The future of advertising is, on one hand, bright enough to improve public health, the environment, and education; on the other, it's dark enough to manipulate individual memory, and even genetics.
Which future we awaken to depends on how much attention we pay to the "red flags" sounding today.
Must Read Next:
Post-AI Playbook: Strategies Immune to Technological Turbulence
How a Restaurant's "Old" Soup Became a Marketing Masterpiece
Marketing & Sales in the Age of AI: What’s Changing and What’s Next
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