‘Connect or die’: The real deal on AI in adland
Publicis Groupe’s new mantra—“Connect or Die”—isn’t just marketing bravado; it’s a stark warning to brands, agencies, and media alike. Unmade's Cat McGinn explains.
Since early 2023, I have typically spent hours each week researching, reading and experimenting with AI tools. That all changed a few weeks ago with a family bereavement, and breaking the habit has really brought home to me the level of anxiety and reactive posture much of the media and marketing world still holds about AI.
The flood of announcements, packed with technical terminology, jargon and buzzwords is simply overwhelming. In a mere fortnight, I had missed three new large language model developments, new reasoning capabilities, new autonomous AI agents, new players entering the market, and a significant new piece of AI legislation. That sense of playing catch up against an accelerating juggernaut is one I hear from across the industry while curating Unmade’s AI conference Humain, and I have renewed empathy for that sense of running just to stand still.
One reason the AI transformation has been unevenly applied across the creative industries is that many of these developments need layers of adaptation and translation before they can add value to an organisation. Many tools are simply not fit for purpose. A development that should cause the advertising world to pay close attention, however, is the update to Publicis Groupe’s AI strategy, released along with the announcement that the French holdco is to acquire data platform Lotame.
Publicis Groupe’s new mantra—“Connect or Die”—isn’t just marketing bravado; it’s a stark warning to brands, agencies, and media alike. The announcement didn’t get the attention I believe was merited.
The advertising behemoth has made a $12 billion bet on AI-powered marketing, with a decade long investment into tech and data. The use cases outlined in a new client presentation from CEO Arthur Sadoun have the potential to dramatically change the agency ecosystem. And if you’re a CEO or a CMO and you’re not prioritising your data strategy, you stand to lose market share in real time.
By embedding AI into the DNA of its operations, Publicis claims the ability to reach 91% of the online population, optimise and swap out creative in real time, and track a staggering 2.3 billion people (via its marketing tech company Epsilon).
Taking the hype out of hyper-personalisation, this is marketing at a scale we’ve never seen before. Unlike many competitors still scrambling for alternatives to third-party cookies, Publicis asserts that it has already future-proofed audience targeting with a privacy-compliant identity model built on first party data reinforced with signals gathered from the social web, purchase patterns and financial data.
The scenario offered is a highly targeted, data-driven advertising machine that doesn’t just react to consumer behaviour—it predicts and manipulates it, adapting campaigns and switching out brands in seconds.
AI-powered workflows, real-time media optimisation, and hyper-personalised creative mean that brands buying into the Publicis model would have unprecedented control over advertising effectiveness. But this also comes with a fundamental shift in power dynamics.
With AI automating creative and media buying, traditional agencies—especially indies—could be in trouble.
Publicis’ ability to tag data across 90% of addressable publishers and 1,400 retailers grants it an almost monopolistic advantage in precision and scale.
Indie agencies that pride themselves on creative storytelling risk being outpaced by algorithm-driven campaigns that optimise in milliseconds.
Credit: iStock.com/Boy Wirat
CMOs may need to reassess their agency roster, weighing up whether to bring more capabilities in-house or partner with data-driven giants powered by heavy AI investment.
This isn’t a distant future scenario—it’s happening now. If you’re an independent agency without serious AI capabilities, your creative work, no matter how brilliant, might not stand a chance against Publicis’ hyper-personalised, data-optimised machine.
One possible scenario is a widening gap between the holdcos and the minnows, with middle-tier agencies being swallowed up into increasing industry consolidation and greater specialism from smaller, niche shops able to remain nimble enough to adapt and survive.
Publicis’ AI dominance seems inevitable, but there are some chinks in its robotic exo-skeleton. Tracking 7,000+ data points per person (US only so far) is a staggering amount of surveillance.
French-owned Publicis claims this data is gathered in compliance with privacy regulations, but that doesn’t mean consumers are aware or comfortable with these capabilities.
This level of data tracking isn’t just about predicting shopping habits—it’s about profiling individuals down to their income bracket and adjusting ad creatives accordingly. While that sounds like a dream for advertisers, from a consumer perspective, this sounds like a dystopian nightmare that most punters will find deeply unsettling.
“We can see Lola’s income has not been keeping pace with inflation, and we predict that Lola is at a high propensity to trade down to private level, so rather than continuing with messaging for our client premium brand we immediately switch to promote the value brand in their portfolio so now she sees refreshed content across all screens,” Publicis CEO Arthur Sadoun says chirpily, outlining a scenario that offers huge efficiency gains for advertisers, but which shoppers are more likely to assume is an episode of Black Mirror.
If people realise they’re being tracked at this scale, and that AI agents are manipulating their purchase behaviour based on algorithms, the backlash could be catastrophic.
Publicis is making it clear: marketing is no longer about gut instinct and big ideas alone—it’s about AI, data, and automation. Brands and agencies that don’t invest in AI-driven strategies will be outpaced, outbidded, and eventually, obsolete.
But in the rush to embrace AI, there’s an urgent need to balance innovation with ethics. The future isn’t just AI-powered—when more and more of our consumer touchpoints are intermediated by machines, trust and transparency will become the most valuable quality of all. The future is one in which organisations must indeed connect or die, but the most vital connection of all remains human.
Cat McGinn is the curator of the AI event for media and marketing, Humain. Early bird tickets are on sale until March 25th.
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A nice piece and especially like the closing line. Some assertions are a bit too definitive, the ‘Connect or die’ meme a la Publicis is pure scaremongering BS. The depth of privacy invasion will not be tolerated in free societies. Full disclosure will be demanded on how much personal data has been mined and exploited. People like me will lobby MPs and Govts. until that happens – and then we can tell Publicis to b*gger off, along with their clients. AI is okay, but not Public’s version.
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