As AI beds in, is brand strategy becoming (ironically) all the more human?

The main strategic issue at the moment, as Anna Rashid, chief digital innovation officer at Tangerine Communications, is that: "Media makes money in the absence of creativity.”

“Brands are operating in an echo chamber,” Rashid explains. “They’re creating these lovely ads about their merits. And they sit people in a room and say: “Watch this to the end”, and the people go: “Fantastic. That’s great. I love it.”

In reality: “Only 15% of people are watching ads to the end. 30% turn the sound off. Most don’t get past the first 2.5 seconds. So what’s happening is that the numbers look good; media is making its money. The ‘echo-chamber creative’ is going out there, but it’s not landing because nobody is seeing it long enough when it goes into the wild. That is the world we live in now. It's an uncomfortable truth. No one wants to recognize it.”

Technological waves

There’s no doubt that tech is having an unsettling effect on the marketing industry, bringing about challenges and opportunities in equal measure. This change brings turbulence. While the promise of VR and AR to live up to its potential in 2025 was mentioned by Victoria Anderson, senior vice president and co-head of strategy at 160over90, arguably the real force driving change is, of course, AI.

For Piper Dolan, US head of research, analytics and strategy at Team Lewis, we need to be keeping an eye on 'agentic AI' in particular: bots that have the agency to take action, and sometimes even make decisions, on our behalf. She uses the example of an AI that gives a user a list of travel options and then books a flight for them.

“It’s still wet clay to a certain extent, and you can’t replace the human,” she says. “But when you start talking about these agents, these different AI models now coming together, and actually being able to perform that action, it requires us to figure out how to now market our brand to AI. That’s a very different scenario. I don’t think it can be one taken lightly and I don’t think it’s something clients have even thought about yet, to be honest.”

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What will it look like for the industry to come round to this change? “I think there’s going to be a ton of AI compliance training,” she says. “I think as this continues to evolve we’re going to see a lot of that happen. But where I would startis: ‘Okay, what’s going to be the appropriate and allowable opportunity for us to layer in the brand story’, while all of this other stuff is coinciding.”

Maria Petkova, account director at Stellar Search, agrees that humans will not be replaced. “I think we still need humans to guide these technologies,” she says. “I think we don’t want to let technology guide us. We need to be the ones taking advantage of it.”

The human condition

In practice, these trends might conspire to engender a move away from performance marketing and a resurgence in top-of-funnel brand strategy – an altogether more human enterprise, ironically enough. As Nir Wegrzyn, chief executive of BrandOpus, puts it, “Agencies are going to have no ability to survive if what we rely upon is AI. Heads of agencies ring me up and go: ‘What do we do? Because this is crap, we are going to die next year if this carries on.’ There’ll be no creativity, nothing happens after that. So we’re going to be back to the Dark Ages if this carries on.

“There’s going to have to be a return of some kind of a human creativity that engages at the level of starting from the strategy, working to the creative strategies, ending up with the creative execution, where things get produced for brands that they actually need. That actually gets engagement, that actually consider: ‘Oh, we’ve got a customer out there.’”

And that, he says, is marketing.

For Rashid, with budgets mostly flat, brands trying to pull off the balancing act that all of this requires will have to ‘think smarter’.

“Thinking smarter not only drives your brand consideration, but it improves the performance of your bottom-funnel ads. So, you can see a reduction in cost-per-acquisition, and you can see an improvement in the conversion rate on your bottom-funnel ads. All of this is obvious and logical and makes complete sense, but the evidence is now there to back this up.”

E-harmony

In the year ahead, Anderson says, it will be the brands that bring together the best tech and talent that succeed. “Certainly, technology and social and all of those things will be necessary tools, but it will be the talent who knows how to leverage them best that wins the day. And that, I believe, will be the differentiator in marketing: the talent that knows how to leverage the technologies best and knows how to read the data best.”

Marek Spadło, creative strategist and creative director at InStreamly, says it’s time for brands that wish to survive to take their heads out of the sand. And, agreeing with Anderson, he says they might not be too disappointed with what they find.

“It will not be feasible soon to say: “We are not using AI,” because, well, if you aren’t, then I’m sorry, but you will not be here three years from now, so you will have to use AI,” he says. “But the need still exists to show people that humans are doing it, that it’s handmade in a way.”

He echoes that the best talent is needed to realize tech’s full potential and says we should think of the signature at the bottom of a painting that identifies its painter.

“Hiring a celebrity, influencer, director, whoever to lead creatively on a campaign and to be the face of it... I believe this usage of signature of human creativity, not as an opposition to AI, but as something that we put on top of what we are doing, ties together many of the trends that were discussed today.”