Did Adland Blast an AI Hole in Its Own Super Yacht?
Once Strategy De Jour, Creative Authenticity Gives Way to AI Backwash
For decades, agencies have stood firmly on a bedrock belief: authenticity matters.
Authenticity in storytelling. Authenticity in the work. Authenticity in how brands show up in the world. We told ourselves and our clients it was the cornerstone of relevance. That in a noisy, cynical market, realness was the differentiator.
And we believed it.
Until we didn’t.
Because somewhere between the pitch decks and procurement calls, AI swept in, and like magpies chasing shiny things, much of Adland tossed authenticity overboard for AI and the promise of ever-rising revenue and share prices.
Suddenly, the same agencies that once waxed lyrical about craft, originality, and hard-won insight are now feeding briefs to language models and auto-generating visual content. Strategy has been boilerplated. Copy has been flattened. Design? Homogenised. We're now in the era of content sludge, a greywash of generative output that’s fast, cheap, and more often than not indistinguishable from the competition.
The bitter irony? In a desperate bid to stay relevant, many agencies may have walked themselves off the plank.
They forgot something crucial: authenticity doesn’t always scale. It’s not efficient by design. It takes time. Perspective. Human friction. Lived experience. Brands don’t just need noise and volume, they need direction, meaning, originality. But now, as the industry pumps out endless sameness disguised as "innovation," clients are already asking: Where’s our edge? Where’s our soul?
And here’s the twist: the ones who refused to jump on the AI bandwagon completely? They may have already won. The ones who use AI as an enabler, not a replacement for creative endeavour, to get the work done with greater efficiency are rising to the top. Creators who stayed true to their craft, those stubborn champions of originality and voice? Winning.
Agencies who phone it in? Only time will tell.
Because as the market floods with blinkered mediocrity, the premium on real thinking, real creativity, craft and real storytelling has never been higher. Brands are starting to see it. Consumers can feel it. The difference is no longer subtle, it’s glaringly obvious.
So here we are. A profession that once claimed to traffic in culture, ideas, and human truths has offloaded its core competency to machines. For what? Quicker turnaround? Sure. More margin? Possibly. A seat at the “future of creativity” table? Not so sure about that one.
If authenticity was once the soul of the agency model, we’ve just traded it for convenience. And in doing so, we may have shot a hole in the very boat we intended to celebrate our next Cannes in.
There’s still time to patch it. But first, we’ll have to remember what the good ship S.S. Adland used to stand for.
