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UK ad agencies undergo their biggest exodus of staff as AI threatens industry
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 14 Feb 2026
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If I had to make a guess, one reason that this particular area might be particularly impacted might be because Internet-based ads have been eating the ad market for years.
My understanding is that part of the shift to online advertising has been to shift to more-targeted advertising than was possible in the past. Like, you can get finer-grained profiles on ad viewers. That's basically what, say, Google enables
it has a profile of users based on information harvested, and it can show different ads tailored to different user demographics. Traditional media
say, print magazines, say
allows for only a limited degree of targeting, like you can put your "teen girl ad" in a magazine that is mostly read by teen girls. But you can only go so fine-grained with that.
And I'd bet that generative AI is an close match to that. Like, I'd guess that one probably typically has copywriters that deal with a particular demographic. Like, say you want ads that target, oh, middle-aged white men, or lesbians, or whatever. I'd bet that the norm with human writers is to have someone familiar with what appeals to a particular demographic.
But then if you're an ad agency, if you want to let your customers target N different demographics with an ad campaign, you need N copywriters familiar with a given demographic.
And if the ad delivery platforms permit for N to be a lot bigger than it was, say, 30 years back, then you really want to be able to generate copy for all of those N demographics to be competitive in your ads. And that's going to increase copywriting labor costs. And generative AI is going to lower copywriting labor costs and avoid the "expert per demographic" constraint.
I'd also bet that a lot of ads use pretty similar tactics to appeal to a demographic. Like, this is relatively-repetitive content similar to existing material that just needs to merge aspects of two different things
(1) a product type with (2) ad techniques that target a given demographic group. That is something that LLMs are fairly good at doing a reasonable job of.
Cringe AI.