AI in Advertising

“OpenAI and Anthropic will quickly join the "power players" in digital advertising by further diving into native ad formats. ... They will attract more ad dollars and could easily become part of the top echelon of ad platforms in just a year or two.”

“In 2025, marketing workflows will be transformed by AI. In turn, the way CDPs deliver value will evolve to balance the human element and the automation, the privacy and possibility, and creativity and control.”

“Broadly speaking, we will start to see more of an impact of GenAI on our revenues in the next year. I think there's nothing to suggest so far that that will be negative, and certainly at the moment it's contributing positively to our revenues.”

“Our intention is to stabilise the business, return to organic growth, create capacity to invest in the future and deliver attractive returns for our shareholders. WPP will become a single company, streamlined into four operating units across four regions, all unified by our pioneering agentic marketing platform, WPP Open.”

“The primary risk of AI-powered marketing is "reversion to the mean" - widespread use of the same generative AI models across the industry "would lead to an era of creative stagnation, mediocrity and boring uniformity." The counter: "getting folks on the agency side who have really good judgment, and who are as much craftspeople as they are knowledge workers, and having them interface with the machines."”

“I'm saying this for the third time. Facebook will do search. And [more importantly] they'll do it well.”

“Is it conceivable that Facebook knew/knows that the ~$4b desktop ad business was not the future of the company and began to focus its resources on sponsored stories/mobile ads that do show up in mobile feeds and can therefore be monetized (and apparently more effectively than their desktop counterparts)? You bet it is… implying that the company has no business model is extremely shortsighted.”

“By mid-2026, more than half of brand creative going through major holdco agencies will involve generative AI in some part of the production pipeline — even if the final spot looks "traditional."”

“Content, this is where I think it gets interesting for marketers, will still be queen because screenbased media and music pop up as, you know, top of the activities when it comes to spending leisure time. So, people are still looking for that entertainment. And that means that advertisers will have more chances to connect with their customers, but they will need to be AI savvy when delivering because AI will push even more content and more choices to people.”

“I think that I don't know how long it's going to take, 5 years, 10 years, but performance advertising, I'm not even talking about brand advertising, that's a different thing cuz it's I'm talking about anything where you get a ton of shots on goal and a like a and a clear signal did this work or not through a conversion. For performance advertising specifically, I don't see room for humans in this.”

“I think that number [AI first creative spend] is still pretty low. But I think it's going to grow very quickly. As as advertisers realize that it's not only a time saver, but it's also something that can distinguish themselves uh, in terms of creating really cool content.”

“I predict that search will be dead in 2020.”

“While streaming services once felt like the death knell for TV advertisers but now are ramping up ad inventory and rolling out ad-supported plans, we'll see that happening in AI too.”

“Not everyone needs to buy everything through AI for it to become a healthy sales channel. This year, many of the sources of friction are going away. Consumers may be surprised at first that they can buy that weather-sealing tape without leaving the conversation. Soon enough, they'll expect it.”

“Your company will interact with customer AI Agents: We’ll be dealing with AI agents acting on behalf of customers. ... Agent-run organizations will be your customer and even competitor: Fully autonomous, agent-run entities may someday become both your customers and competitors.”