The Cross-Eyed AI of the Advertising Market

Martin Sorrell took the stage at DMEXCO and said advertising is looking at the wrong place in AI.

Cannes was mesmerized by the prompt-generated image.

The real disruption, according to him, is in media planning and buying.

250,000 people around the world do this job today.

They won't be doing it for much longer.

He's right. And yet he misses the mark.

Because media isn't the priority either.

The market treats AI like a new Photoshop. Or like a more powerful calculator.

A production tool.

An efficiency tool.

Cross-eyedness.

AI isn't a tool, it's an operating system for intelligence and strategy.

Its true power isn't in making the ad faster, nor in buying media cheaper.

It's in the market capacity to predict markets.

To anticipate behavior.

To understand demand before it turns into a number.

And to actually move brands' P&L in the only area that matters: consumption.

Creativity is a means. Media is a means.

Consumption is the end.

Advertising thinks AI is in the business of making ads. Or distributing ads.

It is.

But that's like using a Ferrari to go to the corner bakery.

What it does that's truly transformative is knowing, before everyone else, what the consumer will want.

How economic variables will impact markets.

How new technologies transform the business of agencies and advertisers.

Whoever looks at AI as a production machine will gain efficiency.

Whoever looks at it as an intelligence machine will gain market.

Myopia 2.0.

Typical of an industry that insists on seeing small.

For decades.