The Impact of AI on the Advertising Media Industry

Artificial Intelligence (AI). Everyone is talking about it, and for once, the hype might not be entirely misplaced.

Now, I have been around long enough to know that every time a shiny new tool lands in advertising, someone calls it “revolutionary.”

Remember when programmatic was going to change everything?

The promise was laser-sharp targeting, supreme efficiency, and the holy grail of buying exactly the right impression at exactly the right moment.

The reality? A lot of cheap, low-quality inventory, plenty of outright fraud, and advertisers left wondering why their “perfectly optimised” campaigns never delivered business results.

So yes, programmatic did change things. But not for the better in my opinion.

AI, though? This one feels different.

Efficiency, or the Illusion of it?

At its core, AI is about speed and scale.

Machines can now tweak bids and placements in real time, a task that used to have rooms full of agency planners sweating over spreadsheets. And it works.

Campaigns run smoother, optimisations happen faster, and even the smallest advertiser can suddenly play with tools that used to be reserved for the giants.

But here’s the critical point. Efficiency for whom?

If the algorithms are being run by agencies or the big platforms, you might want to check whose interests are really being optimised.

Because the machine isn’t some noble truth-seeker. It’s only as good as the objective it’s been fed.

And if that objective is margin rather than your business outcome, well, the machine will happily keep fattening the wrong pig.

The Transparency Problem

Let’s not kid ourselves. Transparency has always been the Achilles’ heel of this industry.

Too often, advertisers don’t really know where their money is going.

AI threatens to make that problem worse, not better.

The old rule still applies: don’t let your media agency mark its own homework.

AI doesn’t change that. In fact, it makes it even more important.

Because now the “homework” is locked inside a black box that runs a thousand calculations a second, and no human in the room can explain what’s really going on.

So Where do Media Agencies Fit In?

This doesn’t mean agencies are finished. Far from it.

But they are going to have to earn their keep in new ways.

No longer the gatekeepers of secret knowledge, they’ll need to become proper partners. Interpreters. Translators. People who can tell you not just what the machine did, but why it matters.

For advertisers, this is actually a chance to reset the relationship. To demand more than just trading efficiency. To reward transparency and accountability.

Agencies that cling to opacity and arbitrage? Their days are numbered.

AI in Measurement: Some Good News

If there’s one place AI really shines, it’s measurement.

MMMs, attributions, econometrics. These things have always been clunky, slow, and ruinously expensive.

AI opens the door to something we’ve never had before: speed and granularity at the same time.

Imagine querying your own media data in real time.

Comparing your spend to your competitor’s market share while you’re in the meeting.

Running “what if” scenarios on the fly. This isn’t science fiction. It’s already here.

And if you’ve been used to waiting until the end of the quarter to find out whether your campaign worked, you’ll know just how revolutionary that is.

Human Oversight Remains Critical

Now, before we all bow down to our robot overlords, let’s be clear: AI still gets it wrong.

Sometimes spectacularly wrong. Feed it biased data and it spits out biased results.

Tell it to chase clicks and it’ll gleefully stuff your campaign full of junk placements.

That’s why human oversight matters more than ever.

Somebody has to set the strategy, define the KPIs, and sanity-check the outcomes.

Machines can optimise a thousand times faster than us, but they still don’t know the difference between a good impression and a pointless one.

New Risks to Manage

AI doesn’t get rid of old risks, it just creates new ones.

Brand safety is trickier when a machine is placing your ads at scale.

Data privacy isn’t going away.

And the more advertisers get locked into one or two mega-platforms, the less leverage they’ll have.

This is why independence matters. Independent measurement, independent governance.

Otherwise, you’re just handing over the keys to your budget and hoping the machine doesn’t decide that low-value inventory inventory is “good enough.”

What Advertisers Should Be Doing Right Now

If you’re an advertiser navigating the exciting world of AI, here’s how you can stay ahead:

1. Learn the basics. You don’t need to be a data scientist, but you do need to know how these systems work.
2. Demand transparency. Ask the awkward questions about data, objectives, and optimisation logic.
3. Get independent validation. Audits, tracking, third-party tools. Don’t take the machine’s word for it.
4. Redefine your agency relationship. Expect strategy and accountability, not just “we’ve got the tech.”
5. Stay nimble. AI is moving fast. Treat this as a journey, not a one-off project.

The Bottom Line

AI is the most powerful force to hit advertising in a generation.

Done right, it can strip out waste, level the playing field, and finally give us the measurement we’ve been crying out for.

Done wrong, it could concentrate power, make transparency even harder to achieve, and turn media into an even bigger black box than it already is.

The choice isn’t whether AI is coming. It’s whether advertisers will take ownership.

Or whether they’ll once again let the industry run off with the steering wheel.