AI in Advertising: From Internal Tool to Marketable Product

Intro
More and more agencies are using AI: producing banners faster, writing scripts, or generating visuals. The first use cases are familiar by now. But the real question for the industry is this: how do you integrate AI in such a way that it doesn’t remain just a tool, but becomes a marketable proposition? A product.

From Cost Savings to Proposition
Jos Vis, CEO of FCB Amsterdam, sees this development every day. “The production side of our craft is changing at breakneck speed. What was a week of work yesterday will be a prompt tomorrow. The reflex is then: great, lower costs. But that won’t win you the battle for relevance. The challenge is to integrate AI into your creative process in such a way that it creates a distinctive proposition. And —ironically— that requires something very old-fashioned: a solid, well-defined process. Using AI in production brings challenges around consistency, reproducibility, and predictability. That demands a very robust process. That process, combined with the tools, becomes a marketable proposition. By the way, it’s also one where the revenue model is no longer based on hours.”

AI as a Creative Partner
That calls for a different perspective. Long before AI reached marketing, AlphaGo —an AI that learned the board game Go— shocked the world with a move no human had come up with in thousands of years. At first the move was dismissed as a mistake; later it proved to be the key to victory. This shows that AI doesn’t only copy patterns, but can also deliver radically new insights. That makes AI an ideal new ally for strategy: faster insights, faster analyses. But the question remains: how do you implement it in your business process and proposition?

From Experiment to Market Value
Many agencies use AI as a tool: an image generator here, a chatbot there. But according to Bart van Maarseveen of Outpacr, the step toward real commercialization needs to be taken quickly. “AI only becomes valuable when you integrate it into an agency’s DNA. An AI trained on your own cases, tone of voice, and brand culture doesn’t produce generic output, it amplifies your unique signature. That way you can sell it as part of your proposition rather than as an extra little tool behind the scenes. Make AI add so much value that you can even recognize it as an asset on your balance sheet.”

Urgency for Agencies
The urgency is clear: clients increasingly expect agencies not only to produce faster, but also to think more innovatively. AI is not a threat, but an opportunity to reach new creative heights, provided it is used as an integral part of the agency offering.

Future
So the question is no longer whether agencies should use AI, but how they should organize it so that it adds value for both the client and the agency. Those who make the leap now —from experiment to marketable proposition— will be stronger in tomorrow’s pitch. Or, as Jos Vis puts it: “You shouldn’t reduce AI to efficiency. It’s the source of achieving greater creative effectiveness.”