By Virginie Goupilleau, award-winning media leader and digital transformation expert
The advertising industry stands at a crossroads. Artificial intelligence is fundamentally reshaping how we conceive, create, and deliver campaigns. Yet, the conversations echoing through our beloved agencies often feel stuck in outdated anxieties, showcasing Mad Men’s resistance to evolution and the adoption of what will be the biggest tech revolution of our lifetime. Whilst creatives worry about machines taking over their jobs (and not being very good at it), media planners grapple with algorithmic optimisation that threatens decades of hard-won expertise. The reality? This transformation is already happening.
Where once campaigns and media plans took painstaking hours of human effort, today’s AI-driven tools churn out campaign variants on the fly, allowing for precision targeting and micro-optimisation with a speed and sophistication that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago.
The question isn’t whether AI will change our industry; it already is. The real test is whether we will lead that change with adaptability and dexterity or be swept away by it. It all lies in our ability to be elastic!
The Elasticity Principle: Future-Proofing Your Career
Les Binet’s work on price elasticity revealed a fundamental truth: strong brands reduce price sensitivity amongst consumers. When customers perceive genuine value and trust their favourite brands, they’re willing to pay premium prices, even when cheaper alternatives exist. This principle doesn’t just apply to products; it applies to our careers.
Think of your professional value as your personal brand elasticity. The more distinctive and valuable your skills become, the more value you bring to the table, the less sensitive clients and employers are to your “price”, whether that’s your salary, your agency’s fees, or your team’s headcount just as premium brands weather economic storms better than generic alternatives, professionals who’ve invested in their unique value proposition prove more resilient during industry upheavals.
The advertising professional who understands both strategic planning and AI implementation becomes invaluable. They’re not just another planner—they’re the bridge between traditional expertise and emerging capabilities. They adapt their ways of working, augment their already rich capabilities to deliver more perceived value to their clients, partners, and business. This elasticity doesn’t happen by accident. It requires
deliberate investment in staying relevant, much like how brands invest in innovation to maintain their premium positioning.
So how do you build this elasticity in an AI-dominated landscape? Focus on the intersection of human insight and technological capability. Develop fluency in AI tools whilst deepening your understanding of human psychology. Master prompting whilst honing your strategic thinking. The goal isn’t to compete with AI—it’s to grasp what it can do and become so skilled at directing it that you become irreplaceable.
Consider upskilling through platforms like Coursera or LinkedIn AI for Marketing courses, or Google’s AI Marketing certification. Experiment with tools like ChatGPT for creative brainstorming, Midjourney for visual concepts, or Claude for strategic analysis. Join communities like the AI Marketing Institute or attend workshops at organisations like the IPA. Follow the IAB Europe’s AI Working Group and join specialist groups such as the AdTech AI chat or the AI Lyceum. The key is consistent, intentional learning rather than sporadic panic-driven cramming. Developing your knowledge will also allow you to develop your critical thinking skills, be measured and balanced in your approach and recommendations, recognising the fad from what is going to last.
Commercial Elasticity: providing flexibility AND profitability to the agency model
This AI transformation isn’t just changing how we work. It is opening entirely new commercial possibilities. The efficiency gains from AI adoption allow agencies to streamline processes, bring together insights quickly, productise certain outputs and therefore offer opportunities to service clients who previously couldn’t afford their expertise, whilst simultaneously providing more sophisticated à la carte services to top-tier clients, and therefore stretching their service capabilities like never before.
Consider the SaaS model that platforms like Meta Business and Google Performance Max have pioneered. These tools democratise access to sophisticated advertising capabilities, allowing smaller businesses to benefit from AI-driven insights, optimisation and outcomes that were once exclusive to large marketers with big budgets. Forward thinking agencies are building similar models, packaging their expertise into scalable self-serve platforms and servicing the longer tail of potential clients.
At the premium end, AI enables a new level of white-glove servicing. Agencies can now manage multiple channels and platforms at unprecedented scale, providing strategic guidance that most in-house teams simply cannot match. The key is having the tech clout to power such set up at scale, the expertise to create and direct AI tools effectively and to continuously update them as the tech evolves, the knowledge to interpret results accurately, and the strategic insight to adapt campaigns in real-time.
This creates an à la carte servicing model where clients can access exactly the level of support they need. Some require full-service partnerships with strategic guidance and creative development. Others need tactical execution with AI-enhanced optimisation. The agencies that thrive will be those flexible enough commercially to offer both, using AI to make previously uneconomical client relationships profitable.
The Unbreakable Human Element: Finding Our Balance
Amidst this technological revolution, we must resist the temptation to automate everything. The advertising industry remains fundamentally about human connection, and certain aspects of our work simply cannot, and should not, be delegated to machines.
People buy from people. That pitch you won last month? It wasn’t because your presentation slides were perfectly optimised by AI. It was because of the chemistry in the room. The client saw themselves working with your team, trusted your judgment, and believed in your collective ability to solve their challenges. No algorithm can replicate emotional connections, the serendipitous spark of a ‘big idea’, the lived experience that shapes truly resonant campaigns, or the moment when a client’s eyes light up because you’ve truly understood their business problem.
Sales remains about building trusted relationships. The best account directors I know succeed because they become genuine partners to their clients, understanding not just their brief but also their broader business pressures, personal career ambitions, and unspoken concerns. They come to them with proactive work that not only solves immediate pressures but is also forward-thinking, future-proofing, and (r)evolutionary. That is true partnership. That level of empathy and relationship-building requires human intuition that no chatbot can replicate.
Strategic thinking, the kind that leads to breakthrough campaigns, requires connecting disparate pieces of information in ways that surprise and delight. It demands understanding cultural nuances, reading between the lines of consumer behaviour, and making leaps of logic that even the most sophisticated AI cannot match (yet).
The question becomes: how far can we push automation before we lose the very essence of what makes advertising effective? The answer lies not in limiting AI adoption but in being intentional about where and how we deploy it. Use AI to handle the routine, repetitive, and data-heavy tasks that drain human creativity. Reserve your human energy for strategy, relationship-building, and the kind of creative thinking that drives genuine business results. This is the value added, the cherry on top, and our elasticity.
The Path Forward
The advertising industry’s future belongs to those who embrace this transformation whilst preserving what makes our work fundamentally human. This isn’t about choosing between human creativity and artificial intelligence—it’s about understanding how they work together to create something more powerful than either could achieve alone.
You must invest intentionally in your own development, approaching AI as a tool to amplify your capabilities rather than a threat to your future. Be elastic and embrace the new. Redefine the rules of engagement whilst fostering what makes us uniquely human in a world where connections, insight, empathy, and strategic thinking will become more valuable than ever.
Take control of your professional and commercial elasticity, building the unique combination of human insight and technological fluency that will make you indispensable in advertising’s AI-powered future. The truth is, AI is not the threat; complacency is. Those who adapt now will define what advertising looks like for the next decade. Those who don’t will be replaced, not by machines, but by those who can handle them wisely.
