AI isn’t the real crisis facing advertising
Tiktok influencers (like Leah Halton, pictured) are drawing the advertising dollars - and audiences
There’s a lot of talk about AI and how it is going to affect the future of advertising. I find the debates strangely reassuring – reassuring in the sense that people believe that advertising has a future. There is a far bigger crisis facing us, and it’s not one that people seem to be talking about.
I have a seventeen year old daughter who only watches free to air TV when she is at her granny’s house. She has the premium versions of Spotify and Youtube, so there’s no interruptions from marketers there. She flies over most of the ads she sees on Tiktok and Instagram.
I asked her about outdoor advertising and she looked at me blankly. Why would she read the back of a bus or a billboard when she has her Airpods on and is looking at a screen? Yet at some point, she will need to buy toilet cleaner, choose a car and insure a house.
You make some pretty good points in this article. I suspect 2026 will bring further death to the agency model. As a designer who got my start in agencies in 2020 and who now works in-house, these are my observations…
1. The salaries are not up to scratch anymore (saw an ad yesterday asking for a creative director for 80k haha).
2. Leadership still act like its the 1990/00’s, always hanging out lunching and reminiscing about the good ol’ days when they just got to hang out on tv ad sets all the time.
3. The ‘agency model’ of working is bloated and too slow for the agile requirements needed for todays market. Delayed sign-off times, no budget and/or no consideration to reallocate funds, large gaps in knowledge because of all the above mentioned reasons.
Got a few more but I think that’s enough haha. Don’t want to sound like they’re all terrible, I wouldn’t have had a career without them, from an objective perspective you can’t help but say the overall trend is pointing down.
I agree. My LinkedIn feed is full of people reminiscing about the great ads of the 90s as if we are still working in an industry where that kind of work stands out. I may have missed it, but I’d love there to be some thought leadership on where we go next, rather than endless awards and agencies singing about work that is often largely ignored by the public. It feels like advertising properly needs rescuing.