When AI ate my copywriter

Time of India

13-06-2025

HighlightsSam Balsara, chairman of Madison World, emphasizes the necessity of combining AI with human ingenuity in advertising, stating that resisting AI to save jobs is a misguided approach. Siddharth Shakdher, chief marketing officer of Paytm, highlights how AI can create compliant advertising, transforming regulatory challenges into creative opportunities for highly regulated industries. Josy Paul, chairman of BBDO, envisions the future of advertising as one that requires new talent who can engage with AI creatively, describing roles such as 'emotion engineers' and 'story whisperers' as essential in maintaining the emotional and cultural depth of advertising.
During the 1990's,
advertising
folk would twiddle their thumbs for weeks, whilst freelance illustrators painstakingly crafted a single visual, recalls a veteran advertising professional. Today, that same concept pops up in seconds, crisper than a fresh packet of crisps and twice as appetising, he adds.
Welcome to advertising's quantum leap, where yesterday's patience is today's competitive disadvantage.
The industry is experiencing its most dramatic transformation while traditional agencies scrambled to understand digital, AI arrived like a meteor impact – sudden, unavoidable, and reshaping the entire landscape. The question isn't whether AI will change advertising; it's whether the industry will change fast enough to harness tech-power, without losing its soul.
Sam Balsara, chairman, Madison World
, isn't mincing words about this shift. Drawing from Bill Gates' tech observations, he's watching history repeat itself in fascinating ways. "To resist AI to save your job is the surest way of losing it," he said, championing the idea that AI should be "utilised and combined with human ingenuity". It's not about man versus machine, it's about creating advertising's dream team.
This philosophical shift represents a fundamental rewiring of how creative work gets done. Recent industry analysis suggests that while 2025 will see increased AI adoption, maintaining the human touch in marketing has never been more critical. Already, the recently concluded IPL saw the entry of a 100 per cent AI generated ad played on television -- in the past AI generated ads were largely restricted to the digital medium.
AI'm a compliance boy
The balance between automation and human creativity isn't just about efficiency – it's about preserving what makes advertising resonate with actual humans. The finance sector is having its eureka moment in marketing, believe some BFSI executives.
Siddharth Shakdher, chief marketing officer, Paytm
, drops a revelation that would make compliance officers weep with joy: "AI can create compliant advertising. AI works a lot on what you are prompted to do and if your prompts are all the compliance frameworks, all your regulations, everything is correctly prompted, then AI will create something that is compliant with that." Suddenly, regulatory nightmares become creative opportunities.
This isn't just about following rules – it's about reimagining how highly regulated industries can communicate. Financial services, pharmaceuticals, and insurance companies have long been handcuffed by compliance requirements. Now they're discovering that AI doesn't just speed up approval processes; it can generate creative concepts that are inherently compliant from conception.
But here's where it also gets complex.
Pratik Shetty, head of marketing, Flipkart
, shares a war story that puts everything in perspective: "We once spent 43 days getting a single actor's expression right. The concept, screenplay and subtle nuances that make an ad memorable still require human creativity."
Those 43 days weren't wasted time – they were an investment in emotional precision. The micro-expressions that make consumers lean in, the split-second timing that turns a good ad into a memorable one, the cultural nuances that make a campaign feel authentically local rather than globally generic. These elements still require human intuition, cultural understanding and emotional intelligence that current AI cannot replicate.
This tension creates advertising's new pecking order and Shakdher paints a rather sobering picture. He predicts quality will nosedive from 50 per cent decent ads to potentially just 10-20 per cent in premium slots. "My fear is that soon you'll start seeing in mainstream media on a IPL or on a really expensive media where you want your best communication out there, you'll start to see transactional communication if people jump on it too quickly."
The democratisation of creative tools often leads to a flood of mediocrity. When everyone can generate visually appealing content in minutes, the marketplace becomes saturated with AI-generated sameness. The premium advertising slots – those coveted IPL commercial breaks that cost crores – risk becoming dumping grounds for algorithmically optimized but emotionally hollow communications.
Yet optimism bubbles beneath industry concerns.
Madhur Acharya, vice president, Aqualens
, describes a workplace revolution: "The volume of creatives we now produce internally (via AI + team) has reduced dependence on external agencies. The execution is faster and we are now less dependent on a third-party agency." He shared his mantra with us "We're steering AI, not being replaced by it."
This shift represents more than operational efficiency. Companies are reclaiming creative control, moving from brief-dependent relationships with agencies to collaborative partnerships with AI tools. Internal teams that once relied heavily on external creative resources are now producing content at unprecedented volumes, iterating rapidly, and maintaining brand consistency across multiple touchpoints.
Prativa Mohapatra, vice president and managing director, Adobe India
, sees the bigger canvas emerging. She envisions AI unlocking "more 3D" and "more imaginative stuff," with creative boundaries dissolving whilst new emotional territories open up.
The technical limitations that once constrained creative ambition are evaporating. Complex 3D animations that required specialized studios and months of production can now be conceptualized and prototyped in hours. This democratization of sophisticated creative tools means that imagination, rather than technical capability or budget, becomes the primary constraint.
Where truth meets magic
Shetty captures this perfectly: "Think of AI like wearable technology, it's about enhancing human capabilities, not replacing humans."
Josy Paul, chairman, BBDO
, brings philosophical depth to the conversation with his vision of advertising's future: "Advertising at its best has always been about the deep human need to connect, to solve problems, to create something out of nothing – something that makes people feel, act and change. That doesn't go away. AI can compute, collate, and clone, but it can't dream. That's where the soul lives. That's where truth meets magic. That's where culture is cracked open and rewired. The soul of advertising lives in the messy, magnificent tension between logic and leap. The future belongs to those who can dance in the in-between - with joy, mischief, madness, and meaning."
Paul also envisions a fundamental shift in talent requirements: "The best talent won't be the ones who resist the machine. They'll be the ones who romance it. The ones who can whisper to it. Joke with it. Challenge it. And make it feel things. We'll look for story whisperers, emotion engineers, truth spotters, empathy coders. People who see the poetry in the prompt. The emotion behind the algorithm."
The role descriptions Paul suggests – emotion engineers, empathy coders, story whisperers – sound like science fiction job titles, but they represent very real skills that are becoming increasingly valuable. As AI handles tactical execution, humans become responsible for emotional strategy, cultural translation, and maintaining the ineffable quality that makes some communications memorable while others are instantly forgotten.
The broader industry is waking up to these realities. Smaller teams are producing more work, with faster iteration cycles and continuous experimentation replacing the traditional campaign model. A start-up produced 60-70 films in six months for its brands, an unthinkable exercise in the past. Creative departments are restructuring around AI-augmented workflows, where junior creatives learn to prompt-engineer alongside senior strategists who focus on emotional architecture and cultural relevance.
This transformation extends beyond individual job roles to fundamental business model shifts. Agencies that once competed on production capabilities now compete on strategic insight and creative direction. The ability to generate hundreds of variations of an ad is becoming commoditized; the ability to know which variation will resonate with specific audiences remains distinctly human.
The Indian advertising ecosystem is particularly well-positioned for this transition. With its combination of technical talent, cultural diversity, and creative heritage, Indian agencies and brands can leverage AI to amplify their cultural storytelling rather than homogenize it. The same technology that threatens to create global creative sameness can be used to celebrate local nuances and cultural specificities.
Whilst everyone obsesses over AI replacing creativity and humans, the opposite might just be happening. As machines handle the mundane, humans are liberated to dream bigger, feel deeper, and create connections that transcend pixels and algorithms. The future isn't about surviving AI anymore, instead it's about using it to become more brilliantly, unapologetically human than ever before.
In advertising's brave new world, our humanity isn't just relevant – it's our superpower. The agencies and professionals who thrive won't be those who resist the machine or surrender to it, but those who learn to dance with it, guiding artificial intelligence with human wisdom, cultural understanding, and that indefinable spark that turns communication into connection. AI might not eat the copywriter, if advertising decides to make a meal out of it.