The Gen AI Reality Check: Ad Leaders Address Ongoing Creative Scepticism

The adoption of Gen AI to creative businesses is no longer a question but an imperative, built around client expectation and demand to both heighten the solutions they receive and perhaps streamline the cost of achieving it. Whether the former improvement on the final product is indeed the case — that remains to be seen — but the expectation for its inclusion in answering briefs is now widespread. Agencies will ignore that at their own cost.

The major tech companies are using it to scale their own advertising offers, once again positioning them as ‘frenemies’ to the agency sector. In May, Google announced its latest search advertising innovation with a suite of tools built with Gemini, claiming to help brands connect with consumers.

However, scepticism of the true benefits of AI adoption remain as research from IAB found with Gen Z and Millennial consumers said to feel “less positive” about AI-generated advertising than ad executives believe. It reported that more than  three quarters (83 per cent) of ad executives said that their company had deployed AI in the creative process - up from 60 per cent the 2024. Cost efficiency was the top benefit, they claimed.

Despite the administration and time benefits that have been proven, creatively the term ‘AI Slop’ remains in use despite a growing focus on improving the craft of its use in ads. To perhaps counter that and encourage the heightening of craft being applied, Cannes Lions has also introduced its Gen AI sub categories this year.

Executives from DEPT, VCCP, Gravity Road, and Accenture Song outline what they see as being the big issues that still need to be overcome when it comes to Gen AI supporting marketer’s pursuit of creative excellence.

Chris Mellish, managing director, Accenture Song, Marketing Practice Lead UK and Ireland

The biggest hurdles to overcome are at an institutional and human level. I have no doubt that Generative AI, when deployed properly, is already an effective tool in fuelling creative excellence. The key is making sure the focus stays on excellence, and not falling into an efficiency trap.

The most exciting examples we've seen happen at the insight stage. Through AI-powered tools like our own Dynamic Mindsets, we're getting richer insights into our briefs, drawing on behavioural patterns rather than blunt demographic segmentations. That extra nuance gives creatives a sharper starting point, and the work is better as a result. We're already seeing the difference for our clients.

There are lots of helpful efficiency gains too. Ideation as a thinking partner, faster production cycles, more frequent testing and optimisation. All of these are great, but the temptation to use that speed to simply produce more work, rather than better work, is the one that brands and agencies need to resist. Creativity is the single biggest driver of long-term profit — anything that waters that down or takes great people out of the process will cost brands far more in the end.

AI is already a big part of our industry. Having seen it used well, supplementing expertise to deliver exceptional work, I’m feeling increasingly positive that it can be a force for good. Time will tell if that's the direction the industry pursues.

Michael Sugden, CEO, VCCP Group

There are many issues to overcome but one trumps them all. Mindset. Marketeers and agencies need to decide what they want from Gen AI. The vast majority of industry conversation remains firmly anchored around driving cost and time efficiencies. Conversations about harnessing Gen AI to make work better are conspicuous by their absence.

This is a troubling blindspot considering marketeers and agencies are paid to create brands and communications that stand out. That’s why VCCP prioritises Gen AI development that enhances creativity whilst maintaining quality - like our campaign Daisy Vs. Scammers for O2, an AI granny designed to waste scammers’ time.

Of course there’s a great paradox here. The easiest way to drive marketing cost efficiencies is by creating brands and communications that make consumers sit up and take notice. Until we change our mindset and use Gen AI in service of creative excellence, its full potential to transform marketing will remain unrealised.

Roy Armale, chief product officer, DEPT

We’re facing the same issues that blocked the adoption of every major innovation, the fact that we’re shoehorning tech into our current ways of working rather than evolving our processes. It’s the root cause behind the productivity J-Curve, a reduction in productivity when adding a new technology. 

The misconception is blaming the reduction in productivity on inertia or resistance to tech when the reality is that users are adopting AI for menial tasks, like emails and summaries, showing that the problem is not intent. 

One barrier to adoption is what we’re calling “agentic fatigue”. When you want to write a better email, your LLM helps, but when you want to optimize a marketing strategy or create assets, you need specialised agents. Some holding companies claim they have tens of thousands of agents enabling their work, so which one do I use when performing my task? How do I give it the context of what I’m doing so that it creates relevant output? 

We’ve tackled this problem by creating a single persistent assistant that has one job: understanding your needs and context so that it gets the right agent to help. However, agentic fatigue isn’t the only barrier, there are more, and most of them are process and behaviour oriented; so, unless we start re-looking at our processes, we’re going to keep asking ourselves why people aren’t using the tech.

Ruairi Curran, executive strategy director, Gravity Road

Gen AI should be a gift to creativity - by stripping out time and cost constraints, ideas that once died due to budget or inertia can now be shared in days. In theory, that should unlock more ambitious, more distinctive work.  But most marketing organisations aren’t set up to capitalise on it. 

Give a typical department more options and you don’t get better decisions; you get more meetings, more stakeholders, and more dilution. In these environments, AI can become the ultimate “Yes Man,” championing what is most likely to work rather than what is most worth making.  Add testing into the mix (still all too often a blunt attempt to rationalise emotion) and all that creative possibility gets compressed into something safe. The result isn’t bad work, just work that’s been averaged out.

So the real issue isn’t the technology; it’s cognitive sovereignty. Too many marketers are operating in systems where playing it safe is entirely rational and real creative authority is rare. But the work that actually moves brands comes from someone willing to back a point of view and say, “no, that’s too logical.” AI doesn’t remove the need for creative courage, but it will expose the marketing organisations that don't have it.