‘The death of creativity'? AI job fears stalk advertising industry

The Guardian

11 hours ago

From using motion capture tech to allow the Indian cricketing star Rahul Dravid to give personalised coaching tips for children to an algorithm trained on Shakespeare's handwriting powering a robotic arm to rewrite Romeo and Juliet, artificial intelligence is rapidly revolutionising the global advertising industry.
Those AI-created adverts, for the Cadbury's drink brand Bournvita and the pen maker Bic, were produced by agency group WPP, which is spending £300m annually on data, tech and machine learning to remain competitive.
Mark Read, the chief executive of the London-listed marketing services group, has said AI is 'fundamental' to the future of its business, while admitting that it will drastically reshape the ad industry workforce.
Now Read has announced he is to leave at the end of this year, after nearly seven years as chief executive and more than 30 at WPP, as the company struggles to keep pace with its peers and also counter moves by big tech to muscle in to the AI-driven future of advertising.
For ad agencies, the upheaval originates from a familiar source. Over more than a decade, the Google and Facebook owner Meta successfully built tech tools for publishers and ad buyers that helped them to dominate online. Big tech hoovered up almost two-thirds of the £45bn spent by advertisers in the UK this year. Now, Mark Zuckerberg wants to take over making the ads, too.
The Meta boss is gearing up to unleash AI tools to allow advertisers to fully create and target campaigns on his social media sites, prompting fears of the 'death of creativity' – and widespread job cuts at agencies.
Last week it emerged that these tools are to be rolled out by the end of next year, with Zuckerberg describing the capability in a recent interview as a 'redefinition of the category of advertising'.
'You don't need any creative, you don't need any targeting, you don't need any measurement, except to be able to read the results that we spit out,' he said last month, in comments that appear to render much of the advertising industry obsolete.
Agencies of all sizes – and particularly the deep-pocketed international groups such as WPP, Publicis and Omnicom – are pouring investment into developing their own AI tools and working with tech companies such as Meta and Google. But the plan is meant to be to keep clients, not lose them.
'I think there is no doubt AI will disintermediate a large number of jobs,' says the chief executive of one big ad agency. 'Having said that, there are many agencies with big corporate clients that really could do with being slimmed down a lot. I can see staffing in areas like strategy, consumer insight and some conceptual roles being safe, but what will be really hit is those involved in production and the realisation of ideas.'
Big tech executives espoused the benefits of AI at the annual Enders Deloitte conference on the media and telecoms industry last week.
Stephan Pretorius, who described himself as 'WPP's AI guy' as he co-led a session with Meta, said that 'creativity, in its purest form, remains a human skill'.
He argued that AI does not equate to job cuts, but admitted that agencies need to restructure and advertising client relationships are changing.
'AI replaces tasks, it eliminates tasks, it doesn't eliminate jobs,' he said. 'A lot of what we used to get paid for is now getting automated and therefore our commercial models have to change, our team structures have to change. The way we are incentivised by our clients is changing. But that is the transition.'
Last month, WPP said there would be an undisclosed number of redundancies globally across WPP Media, formerly known as GroupM, which plans and buys billions of pounds of ad space for clients across digital and traditional media.
'You have a situation where the big holding companies are in a dilemma,' says another ad agency chief executive. 'Clients expect us to invest millions developing AI so they can cut their budgets because things can be done quicker and cheaper. Lots of clients are asking for fee reductions.'
So far the AI revolution does not appear to be having a big impact on the UK industry.
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There were a record 26,787 people employed in media, creative and digital agencies last year, according to the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA), the trade body for agencies that represent 85% of ad spend by clients in the UK.
The IPA has been measuring the size of the market since 1960, when there were 19,000 employees, hitting a low point of just under 12,000 in the early 1990s.
The amount spent on advertising has also grown exponentially, driven by the advent of the internet era, from just £60m recorded in the pre-TV era in 1938.
By 1982 the UK market was worth £3.1bn and this year it is forecast to cross £45bn, according to the Advertising Association/Warc, which has been publishing figures annually since 1980.
Agency bosses believe that for the biggest household name advertisers there is too much brand risk handing over the full creative process to AI, which for now at least does not have the capability to make top quality ads.
'You can often tell a [pure] AI piece of work a thousand yards away – glossy, very idealised and slightly plasticky looking,' says the chief of one creative agency. 'But that will change. You hear creatives saying that AI is never going to come up with something as brilliant as, say, a gorilla playing drums for Cadbury, but I am not so sure. AI will eventually become fine tuned enough to react to the quite left-field conceptual prompting.'
Since making the comments that the industry took to mean that Meta is seeking to supplant the role of agencies, Zuckerberg has tried to clarify that the AI tools are primarily expected to be used by small and medium-sized businesses.
'In the future, if you were working with a creative agency to make creative, you'll probably keep doing that,' he said at the Stripe conference, clarifying his position a week after making his initial comments about the scope of Meta's AI advertising plans. 'If you aren't and you're just hacking something together and throwing it into Meta's ad system, well now we're going to be able to come up with 4,000 different versions of your creative and just test them and figure out which one works best.'
Meta and Google have always considered that they have 'democratised' advertising by enabling the long tail of millions of small businesses that do not have the financial wherewithal to run TV ad campaigns, or employ an ad agency to run campaigns.
'That is the smokescreen they always use,' says the ad agency boss. 'When they first emerged as new ad channels decades ago it was all about small businesses, and now they take nearly two-thirds of all UK ad spend.'
In the noughties as big tech grew increasingly powerful Sir Martin Sorrell, who built WPP into the world's biggest ad group and is now chief executive of S4 Capital, labelled Meta and Google 'frenemies' – meaning they can be seen as a partner and as a competitive threat to agencies.
Two decades on, the rise of AI in advertising is the latest technological development forcing the industry to once again adapt to survive.
'Meta's new promise to 'auto-generate your ad in seconds' is the clearest sign yet that the production sausage-factory is about to be fully mechanised,' says Patrick Garvey, the co-founder of the independent agency We Are Pi. 'It's not the death of agencies. It's the death of outdated agency models.'
He is supportive of small businesses benefiting from the changes, but says Meta's approach to AI is akin to the 'fast food of advertising'. For traditional companies in adland, it could be a difficult meal to stomach.