I’ve been thinking about something since reading a recent McKinsey piece on AI and marketing.
Their central argument is that AI is moving marketing away from campaign execution and towards continuous, AI-enabled growth. It’s an interesting idea. If AI can continuously learn, optimise and personalise, then marketing begins to look less like a series of campaigns and more like a living system of... stuff. Assets, experiences, propositions, products.
I find myself agreeing with the premise.
But I'm also the person who said while someone is building better marketing with AI, there's someone who's working on making marketing irrelevant. So now my mind won't stop wondering whether the real change lies somewhere else.
For most of advertising’s history, the campaign has been the product. Agencies have sold campaigns. Clients have bought campaigns. But the csmpaigns have always been at the behest/request of the client. [I don't think I've ever written the word behest before.]
The industry organised teams, budgets and creative processes - even Cannes around campaigns. For those of you who aren't versed, here's how it typically works: A client identifies a problem and write a brief that poses the problem. Then a strategy couched by the agency based on the insights around the problem leads to a big idea, which becomes a campaign, which is then executed across channels, measured, and eventually replaced by the next one. All based on an organically identified challenge, problem, customer, revenue gap - mostly revenue gap - if we're being honest.
That model has run since before I was born.
But AI now introduces a different possibility.
Imagine a bank decides they're launching a mortgage proposition. Today, it would produce a campaign aimed at a particular audience, supported by a clear message and a consistent set of creative assets aimed at that audience. This is all propped up by a strategic pillar. For the sake of this argument, let's say that strategic pillar is "own your peace" based on the fact that a home brings homeowners a semblance of security and fortitude they will never otherwise experience as tenants. Peace becomes the operative word for comfort, status and security.
Now..
What if, that strategic platform remains exactly the same, but the campaign execution it produces becomes increasingly adaptive? So, a newly married couple might receive a specific narrative about building a family home. Nothing else.
An entrepreneur might see a narrative about creating generational wealth with property ownership. A parent might encounter messaging centred on stability and security for their children. An up and comer may receive one about not being too young to own. Someone who is frantically searching realtor sites may get one about the hassles that surround dealing with unreasonable landlords.
The strategic proposition hasn’t changed. It's still about owning peace.
Only the narrative has. For different people. Based on their own independent contexts. This is submission one.
While I chewed over this, I thought of Netflix as an example. After all, Netflix presents different artwork, recommendations and trailers to different viewers. But the more I thought about it, the more I realised that wasn’t quite the right analogy.
Netflix will still launch a global campaign for Stranger Things. It still produces trailers, outdoor advertising, interviews and publicity. The campaign executions remain largely the same. What changes is the way the platform distributes and delivers it.
That distinction matters to me because what if AI doesn’t simply personalise distribution in terms of what visual one sees?
What if it begins to personalise the entire campaign structure itself? Automatically?
Not by randomly changing headlines or swapping images, but by selecting different narratives while remaining faithful to the same strategic pillar.
Someone drawn to horror receives a campaign hinged on fear and gore. Someone who enjoys coming-of-age dramas receives a story about friendship and growing up. Another viewer sees nostalgia. Another sees action. This is a better metaphor for what I'm proposing. Because someone who is neither sci-fi nor horror intersected would never see an ad for stranger things. And they'd have absolutely no need to. Which means the campaign's ROI automatically becomes more effective.
Simply put, the strategic positioning stays consistent but the storytelling adapts based on audience context.
That feels like something fundamentally different from today’s understanding of personalisation.
In fact, I’m not sure “personalisation” is even the right word anymore.
Perhaps the better term is Narrative Intelligence: the ability for an AI system to determine which human narrative is most relevant to a particular person or moment while remaining faithful to the same strategic truth.
But wait, honey. There's more.
When an AI system is capable of generating thousands of legitimate expressions of the same brand, then what exactly keeps those expressions recognisably connected? What happens to the essence of the brand?
Traditionally, we’d answer that question with brand guidelines. We’d point to the logo, typography, colour palette, photography style and tone of voice.
But those are expressions of a brand.
They aren't the brand itself.
It's the end to end collection of everything that culminates in how it's experienced. It needs something much deeper: a clear understanding of the brand’s beliefs, boundaries, priorities and principles.
The truth is usually, this end to end brand knowing resides in one person. The founder, a la Steve Jobs, an overly attached Creative Director a la Lee Clow/George Lois/David Ogilvy. A lot of the time when a brand dilutes suddenly, it's because the minds who are custodians of the brand have died or moved on. Or some hotshot CMO has chucked out the legacy agency because he wants fresh work. Whatever that means. We've seen this everywhere from The Most Interesting Man in the World to Nike to Apple to Burger King.
In order for an AI to take over what has been an intrinsically human role, brands will need a Constitution.
A Brand Constitution wouldn’t just describe how the brand looks. It would describe how the brand thinks. Feels. Knows. It would articulate what the organisation believes, which values are non-negotiable, what promises it will never break, what cultural tensions it chooses to engage with, and how it resolves difficult trade-offs.
Look o
If my hypothesis turns out to be true, then the most valuable thing agencies will be sought for in the coming decade may not be campaigns at all.
It may be an operating system that ensures every campaign, every story and every decision remains unmistakably true to the brand.
That way, a system knows exactly how to output multiple executions and narratives to different segments in a way that still manages to feel completely brand authentic. We may be surprised that there is no GenZ/Boomer divide. We may just not be approaching the problem intelligently enough.
Then there's another layer. The layer of the AI campaigns not even speaking to us. But to our own AI's. What does a "campaign" look like then? That's a story for another day.
This is by no means thesis. It's more conjecture that we'll continue to interrogate this point. But nonetheless, we have interesting days ahead.