How AI is disrupting the advertising industry

Artificial intelligence is shaking up the advertising business and “unnerving” investors, one industry leader told CNBC.

“I think this AI disruption … unnerving investors in every industry, and it’s totally disrupting our business,” Mark Read, the outgoing CEO of British advertising group WPP, told CNBC’s Karen Tso on Tuesday.

The advertising market is under threat from emerging generative AI tools that can be used to materialize pieces of content at rapid pace. The past couple of years has seen the rise of a number of AI image generators, including OpenAI’s DALL-E, Google’s Veo and Midjourney.

In his first interview since announcing he would step down as WPP boss, Read said that AI is “going to totally revolutionize our business.”

“AI is going to make all the world’s expertise available to everybody at extremely low cost,” he said at London Tech Week. “The best lawyer, the best psychologist, the best radiologist, the best accountant, and indeed, the best advertising creatives and marketing people often will be an AI, you know, will be driven by AI.”

Read said that 50,000 WPP employees now use WPP Open, the company’s own AI-powered marketing platform.

“That, I think, is my legacy in many ways,” he added.

Structural pressure on creative parts of the ad business are driving industry consolidation, Read also noted, adding that companies would need to “embrace” the way in which AI would impact everything from creating briefs and media plans to optimizing campaigns.

A report from Forrester released in June last year showed that more than 60% of U.S. ad agencies are already making use of generative AI, with a further 31% saying they’re exploring use cases for the technology.

Read is not alone in this view. Advertising is undergoing a “huge transformation” due to the disruptive effects of AI, French advertising giant Publicis Groupe’s CEO Maurice Levy told CNBC at the Viva Tech conference in Paris.

He noted that AI image and video generation tools are speeding up content production drastically, while automated messaging systems can now achieve “personalization at scale like never before.”

However, the Publicis chief stressed that AI should only be considered a tool that people can use to augment their lives.

“We should not believe that AI is more than a tool,” he added.

And while AI is likely to impact some jobs, Levy ultimately thinks it will create more roles than it destroys.

“Will AI replace me, and will AI kill some jobs? I think that AI, yes, will destroy some jobs,” Levy conceded. However, he added that, “more importantly, AI will transform jobs and will create more jobs. So the net balance will be probably positive.”

This, he says, would be in keeping with the labor impacts of previous technological inventions like the internet and smartphones.

“There will be more autonomous work,” Levy added.

Still, Nicole Denman Greene, analyst at Gartner, warns brands should be wary of causing a negative reaction from consumers who are skeptical of AI’s impact on human creativity.

According to a Gartner survey from September, 82% of consumers said firms using generative AI should prioritize preserving human jobs, even if it means lower profits.

“Pivot from what AI can do to what it should do in advertising,” Greene told CNBC.

“What it should do is help create groundbreaking insights, unique execution to reach diverse and niche audiences, push boundaries on what ‘marketing’ is and deliver more brand differentiated, helpful and relevant personalized experiences, including deliver on the promise of hyper-personalization.”