The 'death of creativity'? Advent of AI brings fear for jobs in advertising industry

From using motion capture tech to allow the Indian cricketing star Rahul Dravid to give personalised coaching tips for children to an algorithm trained on Shakespeare's handwriting powering a robotic arm to rewrite Romeo and Juliet, the use of artificial intelligence is rapidly revolutionising global advertising campaigns.

- Mark Sweney

Those AI-created adverts, for the Cadbury's drink brand Bournvita and the pen maker Bic, were produced by the agency group WPP, which is spending £300m annually on data, tech and machine learning to remain competitive.

Mark Read, the chief executive, has said AI was "fundamental" to the future of its business, while admitting that it would drastically reshape the ad industry workforce.

Now Read has announced he is to leave at the end of this year, after almost seven years as chief executive and more than 30 at WPP, as the company struggles to keep pace with its peers and also counter moves by big tech to muscle in.

Over more than a decade, Google and the Facebook owner, Meta, successfully built tech tools for publishers and ad buyers that helped them to dominate online.

Big tech hoovered up almost two-thirds of the £45bn spent by advertisers in the UK this year.

Now, Mark Zuckerberg wants to take over making the ads, too.

The Meta boss is gearing up to unleash AI tools to allow advertisers to fully create and target campaigns on his social media sites, prompting fears of the "death of creativity" - and widespread job cuts at agencies.

Last week it emerged that these tools are to be rolled out by the end of next year.

Zuckerberg described the capability in a recent interview as a "redefinition of the category of advertising.

You don't need any creative, you don't need any targeting, you don't need any measurement, except to be able to read the results that we spit out," in comments that appear to render much of the industry obsolete.

Agencies of all sizes - and particularly the deep-pocketed international groups such as WPP, Publicis and Omnicom - are pouring investment into developing their own AI tools and working with tech companies.