Ads Without Authors: How Automation Dismantles Holding Companies—and Culture

Forbes

2 days ago

AI-Optimized Advertising, Human Authorship Erased: The Cost of Automation
Platforms like Meta, X, Google, and Amazon aren't just automating ads—they're bypassing the agencies that built the industry. In the race to own the feed with automation, friction is fatal.
Advertising has long been a canvas for human creativity, reflecting and shaping societal values. From iconic campaigns that captured the spirit of an era to ads that challenged social norms, human-crafted advertising serves as a cultural touchstone. Removing humans from this process doesn't just streamline production—it risks erasing the cultural narratives embedded within these messages.
Future generations won't study Midjourney outputs. They'll study the ads we made—because ads, at their best, are the sharpest shorthand for what a society values, fears, and aspires to become. As we delegate creative control to AI, we must ask: what stories are we losing, and what does that mean for our collective cultural memory?
Meta's latest ambition to fully automate ad creation by the end of 2026 isn't just a business strategy—it's a warning. The company's vision is deceptively simple: advertisers provide a product image, a budget, and a few goals, and Meta's AI handles the rest—copywriting, visual generation, media placement, and real-time optimization. The entire campaign lifecycle becomes push-button.
Meta is reportedly considering integrations with tools like Midjourney and DALL·E to enhance asset creation. The ambition is to make advertising seamless, especially for small and midsize businesses that lack in-house creative teams. However, what begins as simplification quickly becomes centralization, where one platform governs not only distribution but also expression.
What's at stake isn't just jobs—it's the future of originality, the pipeline of creative talent, and the power to shape culture. If Meta's model becomes the norm, we risk a creative monoculture, where differentiation dies and everything starts to look alike because the same machine created it.
Proponents will argue that this democratizes advertising, thereby leveling the playing field for small businesses. And they're not wrong. But democratization without differentiation still leads to mediocrity. Tools may become accessible. But brands become interchangeable.
And Meta is just the start. Spotify is auto-generating background music. Amazon is letting AI write product listings. Google is publishing AI-generated search summaries. Even journalism is being templated by prompts. We're not just automating workflows—we're displacing the origin of voice, taste, and intent.
What Meta is proposing is not just an automation layer. It's a creative feedback loop entirely governed by the platform itself. When Meta automates both the creation and the optimization of ads, it doesn't just accelerate the campaign cycle—it collapses the loop. The ad that performs best becomes the blueprint for the next, narrowing the window for originality until all that remains is whatever the algorithm can predict. This is not creativity—it's curation at scale.
Let's get something straight. These systems are not creators. They are morph engines—remixers of data, not originators of thought. What they do appears to be creative, but it isn't. It's a simulation. Highly effective, often impressive, but fundamentally derivative. They are powerful tools. But we should never mistake the tool for the purpose.
Meta's automation play reveals the larger issue: we're not just automating tasks, we're automating the conditions that make originality possible. When everything is a remix, who's responsible for the remix's meaning? And when every brand runs through the same pipeline, what's left of the difference?
Jean Baudrillard, a French sociologist and philosopher known for his work on simulation and hyperreality, once said, 'The sad thing about artificial intelligence is that it lacks artifice and therefore intelligence.' That's precisely the point—AI can fake style, structure, even tone. But it can't fake a purpose. Not yet. And probably not ever.
AI doesn't create—it interpolates. And interpolation is not insight. It's the ghost of thinking without the burden of understanding. It's mimicry in drag. Personalization isn't creativity. It's precision. It tells you who to speak to, but not what to say—or why it matters. The performance of intent, minus the spark that gives it life.
Across industries, the same logic is taking hold:
Everywhere, the promise is the same: faster, cheaper, better.
And everywhere, the result is the same: homogenization.
The deeper risk isn't job displacement—it's meaning displacement. When creativity is automated, it loses its expressive quality and becomes more efficient. And once it's efficient, it's disposable.
Ursula Franklin, a physicist and philosopher best known for her work on the social impact of technology, captured this tension in her definition of prescriptive technology: 'designs for compliance.' She warned that when work is reduced to repeatable steps, we lose not only control but also the creative possibility of deviation. Franklin contrasted this with holistic technologies, which preserve human intuition and craft. Our future depends on protecting the latter.
Friction is not failure. Friction is the forge.
The moments we remember in business—or life—aren't the ones that ran on rails. They're the ones who nearly broke us. The campaign that almost didn't ship. The pitch that bombed, then landed. The rewrite that found the truth.
In our race toward frictionless everything, we're stripping away the very texture that makes things memorable. And Meta's move to automate the entire ad pipeline is just the latest attempt to turn marketing into math—flawless, efficient, lifeless.
Friction isn't a flaw in the system. It's the source of learning, innovation, neuroplasticity, and art. Whether in synapses or symphonies, friction is how we stretch. It's how the human mind adapts and creates meaning. Without it, we may get results, but we won't get resonance.
In a world saturated with auto-generated content, what becomes scarce isn't information—it's resonance.
And resonance can't be manufactured. It has to be felt.
The brands that will matter tomorrow won't be the ones that optimized the most impressions. They'll be the ones who found a way to bypass the algorithm and create something tangible. Something experiential. Something no AI could hallucinate into existence.
This is where experiential marketing becomes more than a tactic—it becomes resistance. It's not a return to analog. It's a return to meaning.
Kurt Vonnegut wrote, 'We are dancing animals. How beautiful it is to get up and go out and do something.' The algorithm may be able to mimic the rhythm, but it will never learn to dance. It can choreograph—but not choose to move.
What Meta is doing—what nearly every vertical is racing toward—is based on a seductive lie: that easier is always better. But ease is not a virtue. It's not the metric by which we measure a life, a brand, or a society.
We weren't built for ease. We were built for meaning. And meaning requires effort. It requires tension. It requires authorship.
To automate that away in the name of scale is not progress. It's surrender.
If we must automate, let's automate to amplify, not erase. Tools should provoke better questions, not just faster answers. That means keeping humans in the loop. It means labeling AI-generated creative work. It means building guardrails that force friction back into the process, rather than removing it entirely.
Because when ads are created by machines and optimized by machines, who is accountable for their influence? If you're not the author of what shapes your choices, are they your choices? We need more than regulation—we need a red line. Authorship, consent, and sovereignty should not be optional when automation touches identity.
This isn't just a creative threat—it's an existential one for holding companies and agencies.
The largest tech platforms—Meta, Amazon, Google, X, Microsoft—make billions from advertising. However, as their AI systems become increasingly close to brands and consumers, the need for intermediaries begins to diminish. Why would Meta need an agency when it can generate, target, and optimize ads directly for the brand? Why would a brand rely on a holding company when it can plug into the model that sits at the heart of the user's digital life?
As AI-native platforms move closer to both brands and consumers, the traditional agency model finds itself at a crossroads. Holding companies were designed for fragmentation—fragmented channels, insights, creative, and data. But when the platforms now own the whole stack, and the AI becomes the primary interface to the consumer, what's left for intermediaries to manage?
Tom Sivo, VP of Emerging Technology at Interpublic, puts it this way:
The holding company was built for a time when storytelling, media buying, and consumer insight were fragmented. Today, the platform is the channel, the data, and the distribution.
And the AI? It's the last mile. It sits in the user's pocket, anticipates their intent, and steers the interaction before a brief is ever written.
In that world, holding companies don't evolve—they vanish.
Because the agency becomes a friction in a system that worships fluidity, and whoever is closest to the consumer controls the conversation.
Today, that's no longer a strategist, a planner, or a brand team.
It's the model.
The danger isn't just that AI will replace our jobs. The danger is that we will replace ourselves—inch by inch, prompt by prompt—until we no longer remember what it felt like to make something real.
I'm not anti-AI. But I am pro-human.
And being human isn't just a biological fact. It's a creative act. One that we perform daily through our decisions, expressions, and struggles. If we let go of that—if we let AI simulate not just our output but our intent—we don't become more efficient. We become spectral. Present, but not alive.
So yes, automate the repetitive. Automate the dull. But draw a line.
Because if we automate the struggle, we lose the story.
And if we lose the story, we lose the point.
If you're building with AI, ask yourself this: Am I amplifying human brilliance—or replacing it with synthetic volume? Because once originality is gone, no algorithm can recreate it.
The future isn't human or AI. It's human with AI—if we build it that way. But only if we remember that tools are only tools. Meaning is still up to us.
Because the point isn't productivity. Its meaning. To create is to leave a trace. If AI erases the struggle, what's left behind isn't art. It's output.
And through automation, if every ad is machine-generated and every engagement is machine-measured, we're not choosing; we're being programmed.