Highlights
- Madison World Chairman Sambarsara highlights the need to combine AI with human ingenuity in advertising, saying that resisting employment with AI is a misguided approach.
- Siddharth Shakdher, PAYTM's Chief Marketing Officer, highlights how AI can create compliant ads and translate regulatory challenges into creative opportunities in highly regulated industries.
- BBDO Chair Josy Paul describes the roles of “emotional engineers” and “story whisperer” as essential to maintaining the emotional and cultural depth of advertising, requiring new talents that can be creatively involved in the future of advertising.
In the 1990s, people in adverts were wearing their thumbs for several weeks, but freelance illustrators painstakingly create a single vision, reminiscing of veteran advertising experts. Today, that same concept pops up in seconds, twice as crisp and appetizing than fresh potato chips, he adds.
Welcome to Advertising's Quantum Leap, where patience yesterday is today's competitive disadvantage.
The industry is experiencing the most dramatic transformation, while traditional institutions have rushed to understand digital, but AI has arrived like the impact of meteors. The question is not whether AI changes ads. It's whether the industry will change quickly enough to utilize its technical capabilities without losing its soul.
Sam Barsara, Chairman of Madison WorldI'm not writing down words about this shift. Drawing from Bill Gates' technical observations, he sees history repeating itself in a fascinating way. “For AI to resist to save your job is the surest way to lose it,” he said, defending the idea that AI “combines with human ingenuity.” It's not about people and machines, it's about creating a dream team of advertising.
This philosophical change represents the fundamental rewiring of how creative work is done. Recent industry analysis suggests that AI adoption will increase in 2025, but maintaining the human touch of marketing is more important than ever. Already, recently concluded, IPL saw an entry for 100% AI-generated AD played on television.
ai'm a compliance boy
The balance between automation and human creativity is not just about efficiency, but about maintaining advertising that resonates with real humans. The financial sector believes some BFSI executives have a marketing eureka moment. Siddharth Shakdher, Chief Marketing Officer, Paytmdrops the revelation that will make the compliance officer cry with joy. “AI can create compliance ads. AI is what you've been encouraged to do, and if your prompts are all compliance frameworks, everything is prompted right. Suddenly, regulatory nightmare becomes a creative opportunity.
This isn't just about following the rules. This is about rethinking how highly regulated industries can communicate. Financial services, drugs and insurance companies have been handcuffed for a long time due to compliance requirements. Now they are discovering that AI doesn't just speed up the approval process. It can generate creative concepts that essentially follow from conception.
But it gets complicated here too. Pratik Shetty, Head of Marketing at Flipkartshares a war story with everything in mind. “We once spent 43 days to correctly express the actors. The memorable concepts, scripts, and subtle nuances of advertising still require human creativity.”
These 43 days weren't time–they were an investment in emotional accuracy. The microscopic expression that sets consumers in mind, the instantaneous timing that turns good ads into memorable ads, and the cultural nuance that makes the campaign feel genuine, local, rather than globally common. These factors require human intuition, cultural understanding, and emotional intelligence that cannot be replicated by current AI.
This tension creates a new hierarchy of advertising, and Shakdah draws a rather calm picture. He predicts that from a decent ad with 50% quality, it will plummet to just 10-20% in premium slots, potentially just 10-20%. “My fear is to start watching right away in mainstream IPL media and incredibly expensive media that require the best communication.
The democratization of creative tools often leads to mundane floods. When everyone can generate visually engaging content in minutes, the market will be saturated with AI-generated identity. Premium Ad Slots – Coveted IPL commercial breaks costly – risks becoming an algorithmically optimized but emotionally hollow communication dumping site.
However, optimism bubbles up under industry concerns. Madhur Acharya, Vice President of AqualensIt explains the workplace revolution. “The amount of creatives we produce internally (via AI+ team) has reduced our reliance on external institutions. It runs faster and now we don't rely on third-party agencies.” He shared the mantra with us.
This shift represents more than operational efficiency. Companies are regaining creative control and are moving from simple dependencies with institutions to co-partnerships with AI tools. Once heavily relied on external creative resources, internal teams generate content on unprecedented volumes, repeat quickly, and maintain brand consistency across multiple touchpoints.
Prativa Mohapatra, Vice President and Managing Director, Adobe Indiasee a larger canvas appear. She envisions AI that unlocks “more 3D” and “more imaginative.”
The technical limitations that once constrained creative ambitions have evaporated. Complex 3D animations that require specialized studios and months of production can now be conceptualized and prototyped in hours. This democratization of sophisticated creative tools means that imagination is the main constraint, not technical capabilities or budgets.
Where the truth meets magic
Shetty captures this perfectly. “Think of AI like wearable technology. It's not replacing humans, it's about improving human capabilities.”
Josie Paul, BBDO ChairmanBrings philosophical depth to conversations with the vision of the future of advertising. “The best ads have always been about the deep human need to solve problems and create something out of nothing. The messy and epic tension is logic and leaps.
Paul also envisions a fundamental change in the requirements of talent. “The best talent is not those who resist machines. They are those who romance it. They are those who can joke about it. Make a joke about it. They will challenge it.
Paul suggests the role description – emotional engineer, empathy coder, story whispers – sound like the title of a science fiction job, but they represent highly realistic skills that are increasingly valuable. When AI handles tactical implementation, humans are responsible for maintaining the indescribable quality that makes emotional strategies, cultural translations, and some communications memorable while also keeping the indescribable quality that instantly forgets other communications.
The broader industry is awakened to these realities. Smaller teams are generating more work, faster cycles of repetition, and continuous experiments to replace traditional campaign models. The startup produced 60-70 films in six months for the brand. This was an unthinkable movement in the past. The creative division is being rebuilt around Ai-Augmented Workflows. There, junior creatives learn to learn rapid engineers along with senior strategists focusing on emotional architecture and cultural relevance.
This transformation extends beyond the role of individual employment to a fundamental business model shift. Institutions that once competed in production capacity are now competing in strategic insights and creative directions. The ability to generate hundreds of variations of advertising is commoditized. The ability to know which variations resonate with a particular viewer is clearly human.
India's advertising ecosystem is particularly well positioned for this transition. The combination of technical talent, cultural diversity and creative heritage allows Indian institutions and brands to leverage AI to amplify cultural storytelling rather than homogenize. Local nuances and cultural idiosyncrasies can be celebrated using the same technology that threatens to create global creative identity.
While everyone is obsessed with creativity and AI that replaces humans, opposition may be happening. When machines process things, humans are freed to dream bigger, feel deeper, and create connections that transcend pixels and algorithms. The future is no longer an AI survivor, instead, using it to become more beautiful and human than ever before.
In the brave new world of advertising, our humanity is not merely related. It is our superpower. Prosperous institutions and experts are not those who resist or surrender to the machine, nor are those who learn to dance with it. AI may not eat a copywriter if the ad decides to cook a meal.
