By Federico Soto Roland, Strategy, AI & Digital Director at NSB Agency
The idea that "AI is going to impact advertising" is already outdated. The right tense is the present continuous: AI is already doing it … and how!
Tools like MidJourney or Nano Banana for images, Veo3 or Kling AI for video, and the whole zoo of conversational models (ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, you name it) are no longer cool toys: they're tools worthy of a 1990s sci-fi movie when it comes to the visual and conceptual generation of campaigns and creative, capable of spitting out in minutes what used to take hours… or days. It's not hype, it's scale.
The data shows this remarkable impact. MONKS reported cuts of up to 50% in their campaigns' time-to-market, more final variants, and performance figures that hurt to compare: CTR 80% higher, CPA 31% lower versus 100% human-made pieces. Like it or not, that has already set a new competitive baseline.
Boston Consulting Group and Harvard Business Review amplify the point: teams using GPT-4 improved quality and productivity by 40% in consulting work. Neither creatives nor planners are immune to that logic.
At NSB we estimate that working with AI pushes our productivity up by 30–40%, between faster drafts, creative routes that were previously unworkable, and the ability to prototype campaigns more nimbly —many of which we'd have "killed" out of fear of the cost of producing them.
But no, AI (still) doesn't do magic
The party stops when we move from "generating things" to "thinking up creative campaigns." That's where AI starts to skid.
A study by TBWA together with Monash University analyzed more than 1,000 award-winning campaigns, ran them through LLMs and compared recreations produced by their binary-intelligence engines. The result? The models sanded down metaphors, erased cultural humor and flattened the creative leaps. AI turns ideas into tidy deliverables, no rough edges, none of that discomfort that sparks memorable ideas. Perfect, but harmless.
And we already know: the models work on probabilistic patterns. If you train machines to average, don't complain when they hand you back… average. Or its more elegant version: sameness.
The evidence repeats across other papers: AI boosts the productivity of mediocre profiles (and there, yes, it explodes!), but the incremental gain shrinks as seniority rises. AI lifts floors far more than ceilings (though it does lift those too, mind you!).
Rethinking the price of our added value
This drags us to the elephant in the room: we can't keep charging as if our differentiator were "hours of work" precisely when the technology is compressing those hours. If we let ourselves be tied to that model, we're toast!
Remember the old anecdote about the engineer and the hammer … still relevant because it lays bare what's essential: you don't pay for the strike that solves the problem, but for knowing where and how to land it. That "knowing where, how and why" is the real asset that we creative agencies have to start charging for explicitly —for the value we bring to brands, and not just for the time we spend on strategic-creative production.
Execution —layouts, renders, videos, copy variants— is already partly a commodity. What isn't a commodity is the ability to detect the right strategy, understand the culture, challenge the client, connect insights, break with the expected and present a Big Idea that, precisely, can't be generated by an algorithm trained to make no one uncomfortable.
In the same study cited above, BCG and HBR found that AI was 23% less effective at solving complex business problems. The cause? "Persuasive hallucination": answers that sound perfect, trustworthy, and completely wrong. A junior can sell you smoke; an AI, with even more confidence.
That's where the real value appears: judgment, synthesis, lived experience, battle scars, creative instinct, knowing when an idea is genuinely good and when it's merely plausible. That can't be copied, can't be scraped, can't be easily trained.
In the age of AI, we become great brand curators, filterers and selectors of the best creative paths. We'll have to say many more "NO"s than YESes, faced with the flood of options AI offers up with its ease and speed of production. We'll have to challenge the status quo and creative conformity, more than ever before!
Without a doubt, agencies will have to adjust processes, teams and ways of operating to fit the new reality. But what's beyond doubt is that in the new creative economy, experience isn't a "nice-to-have", it's an asset that belongs on the invoice! Because yes: AI accelerates, scales and democratizes. But the human differentiator remains the source of brand value, and that value isn't measured in minutes of work but in years of thinking differently.
