At Google's recent summit, the company revealed powerful new AI tools that have huge implications for advertising:

These innovations aren’t just flashy tech demos. They’re designed specifically to automate aspects of creative advertising – an area traditionally dominated by agencies and creative teams. Suddenly, agencies find themselves competing not just with other human minds, but with tireless, endlessly scalable machines. Creativity, the core of every agency’s value, is now part of the AI automation revolution.

This development signals a fundamental shift: Agencies must rapidly adapt or risk obsolescence. The technology doesn’t simply replace human creativity; it complements and challenges it, creating a new standard for speed, clarity, and relevance. The competition is no longer just other agencies – it's also the algorithms now quietly reshaping advertising.

Initially, when we first began testing automated ad creatives through Meta Advantage+ and Google’s Performance Max (PMax), I honestly laughed. The outputs felt generic, predictable, and lacking genuine originality – like robot interns had hastily mashed together every ad in existence into a bland porridge.

Then I stopped laughing.

Yes, what we were seeing wasn't creative at all. In fact, presenting work like this would have gotten creative teams fired throughout my career in marketing. 

But it was fast. And it was precise. That speed of execution and absolute relevance mean AI doesn’t need to surpass your best creative idea. It only has to outperform your slowest brainstorming sessions. (And I'm sure we've all had a few of those in our time.)

Yet here’s a crucial point: AI-generated outputs are still entirely dependent on human inputs.

AI itself is merely a factory; you remain the architect. Your strategic vision, nuanced understanding of context, familiarity with your client brands' SuperFans and your sophisticated taste continue to define success or failure.

And the better you know – and really understand – your customers, the greater your chances of success. 

Step 1 – Get Out of Your Comfort Zone. Challenge your team with internal AI sprints. Take a live campaign and rapidly generate 20 AI-driven headlines and visuals, then run structured A/B tests against your best manual efforts. Confronting direct AI competition helps sharpen skills and overcome complacency.

Step 2 – Learn a New Skill. Build a comprehensive prompt library. Develop reusable templates that combine deep strategic insights with precise tactical execution, enhancing the speed and effectiveness of your creative processes.

Step 3 – Add Value. Adopt AI-generated content as your starting point, not your finish line. Quickly accelerate to 70% completion, then add strategic value through human expertise, nuance, and refinement, ensuring exceptional results. I use AI to help with these newsletters. It makes a huge difference. 

Step 4 – Move Up Faster. Openly benchmark yourself against AI. Introduce every client pitch by demonstrating the current AI baseline clearly, then highlight precisely how your strategic vision surpasses automated outputs, underscoring your indispensable human value.

The winners in tomorrow’s advertising landscape will not be those who resist AI.

It will be those who leverage it, who use AI’s superpowers for rapid iteration, smarter testing, and sharper strategic decision-making.

(By the way, these four steps make up my Return on Marketing Career (RoMC) framework—more on that here.)

If you’d like to discuss your career journey with me one-to-one, please feel free to email me at [email protected] or message me on LinkedIn.

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