What the “cockroaches” of the ad world teach about dealing with AI

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When advertising executives describe themselves as cockroaches, they are not being self-deprecating. Admen have shown a remarkable ability to survive what look like extinction-level events. Copywriters adapted to radio in the 1920s; artists embraced tv in the 1950s. Agencies clung on in the early 2000s as ads moved online. This week, in the face of another technological revolution, the admen steadfastly held their annual jamboree on the French Riviera.

The latest upheaval, brought by artificial intelligence (AI), is testing the cockroaches as never before. Advertising is one of the sectors most radically affected by AI so far. As such, adland offers a postcard from the future for other industries. Three lessons stand out.

The first is that the moat between human workers and chatbot rivals is narrower than most people think. Creative work is often seen as immune from automation. Large language models (LLMs) are designed to predict the most likely answer, which is often the opposite of the most original one. The best ads remain too weird and wonderful for any machine to have dreamt up: consider the campaign that attached step-counters to chickens to advertise free-range eggs.

Yet this week in Cannes TikTok, Meta, Google and other ad platforms showed off AI-powered features that can create passable video or rewrite ad copy at the click of a button. Their output will not win any awards. That does not matter. Most of the $1trn that is spent on ads each year goes towards workmanlike campaigns, rather than Cannes trophy-bait. Sam Altman’s prediction that AI will one day be able to do 95% of marketing may sound like boosterism for his firm, OpenAI. But the inspired human-made content that people present as a counter-argument is firmly within the remaining 5%. Robots will content themselves with the rest.

Another lesson is that the biggest companies have the most to gain. This runs counter to a popular narrative, that AI will democratise skills and intelligence. It is true that the new tools from Meta and co will allow millions of micro-businesses to produce video ads of a quality that was once out of their reach, and translate text into several languages. Global campaigns can now be launched online for hundreds of dollars; TV-worthy commercials are being put together for a few thousand.

But take a step back and it is clear that the serious money is being made by the giants. The selling of ads was already becoming more concentrated: four tech firms that accounted for a third of the global ad market five years ago now account for half of it. And America’s biggest companies are ramping up their AI investment at a faster rate than the rest. No wonder: AI requires computing muscle and large data sets, both of which are expensive. Whereas human intelligence is more or less randomly distributed, the artificial kind can be bought. Rather than democratise access to intelligence, AI may allow the richest to hoard it.

The last lesson from adland is that AI’s spread will have unpredictable consequences. Some advertisers are shifting their budgets from tv to the humble outdoor billboard. Why? In part because AI has made it possible to infer from vast data sets whether consumers who saw the ad bought the product, allowing marketers to measure the campaign’s effectiveness rather than guess at it. Another unexpected winner is old-school public relations. As consumers switch from search-engines to chatbots, brands need to persuade LLMs to speak highly of them. The most effective way to do that is to influence the sources that the model pays most attention to, such as news articles. In the AI age, high-tech “search-engine optimisation” may be less effective than offline schmoozing (or so, at least, marketers can insist when presenting their post-Cannes expenses claims).

Adland is an outlier in important ways. Ad spending is highly cyclical, so the industry has benefited more than most from the AI-fuelled boom of recent years. The big tech firms that are active in ads also happen to be leaders in AI, and have used ads to test their newest products. And not everyone has the admen’s knack for survival. But the rest of the business world should pay attention to the cockroaches of Cannes. The revolution in adland is a taste of what is to come.

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