Attack of the clones

At the start of the year Publicis CEO Arthur Sadoun personally thanked 100,000 individual staff via AI video. Last month, hackers used AI to clone WPP boss Mark Read’s voice, and lifted public YouTube footage to launch a deepfake sting via Teams. It failed – but other big firms have already been duped, losing tens of millions of dollars in the process. It’s likely the molecular tip of the iceberg.

Scam proliferation aside, the speed at which AI is advancing poses significant challenges to the media supply chain, according to US-based media ecologist Jack Myers. Nobody can keep up.

“It’s almost as if there is no time for innovation any more,” he told Mi3. Myers thinks the current wave of disruption is unlike any other.

“Whether it was cable [TV] coming in on top of broadcast, or the internet, or mobile, there was time for development, time for innovation – time for advertisers,” said Myers. “Then agencies would go through a period of trying to push it out of the way and then slowly investing in it and moving in, finding it’s right place – and then the winners survive and the losers collapse.”

But that pacing no longer exists.

“There’s been no time for advertisers to really figure it out … so there will be a much quicker collapse.”

Agency consolidation incoming

Of the hundreds of AI companies currently making the running, Myers sees “ultimately, three or four unicorns that survive out of the whole AI business”, with ChatGPT being one.

For agencies, he thinks the upshot will be accelerated consolidation of creative and media. Global agency bosses – such as Initiative’s Dimitri Maex – agree. "That is the future, we’re going to need to bring these things back together in some shape or fashion … that is definitely a trend that is happening,” Maex tells Mi3 in a forthcoming interview. 

Myers thinks the consolidation trend is about to accelerate.

“The re-emergence of the consolidated agencies, creative and media – that's the big story for me for 2025-26,” said Myers.

“It has to [happen], with AI, it has to start feeding the creative component into the attribution again, and look at the two together. And that's going to be where the industry is going to reinvent itself,” he suggests.

“So I look positively at the opportunities for advertising [from] machine learning, but we're just moving too quickly for the industry to adapt, and those who can't adapt, ultimately, are going to disappear.”

Myers thinks those calling for a pause on ‘giant AI experiments’ are right to be worried.

“I’m advocating for slowing down. Sir Tim Berners Lee and hundreds of other tech people are advocating for slowing down. But it’s not going to happen.”

Hence, he says, prepare for circa 80 per cent of media planning and buying functions to be human-free within five years.

If you haven't already, get the lowdown on Myers' five year forecast via the Mi3 podcast here.