AI will fundamentally change advertising and marketing, industry verticals, and society at large.

The latest AI tools are probabilistic engines that generate human-like language, images, and video. Artificial Intelligences (AI), like the people who created them, are interplays of light and dark. Despite their limitations, AI have proved invaluable to many fields—notably science, coding, business, and media.

Given that generative AI can produce art, copy, and code, the advertising industry must engage with these engines, and Ogilvy has been on the leading edge of that. We have explored a range of generative and analytical AI in order to serve our clients better, and we have learned that the incorporation of it into advertising and marketing will not herald the death of the agency or the sunset of human creativity.

Instead, AI will lead to a creative and strategic renaissance. AI will spur better ideas and deeper insight by speeding up creative iteration and mechanizing aspects of execution and production, freeing creative and strategic minds to focus on big ideas and solutions to client problems—to, in short, imagine. The legal and ethical aspects of AI are unsettled, and Ogilvy will always err on the side of caution; we will respect the rights of artists and the confidentiality of client information.

In our view, generative AI needs to follow certain creative commandments.

Commandment 1: Build new teams. We have relied on creative teams from the dawn of the creative revolution, but no longer will they be an art director and copywriter working as a pair. To that, we now add AI, and more. These teams will grow and contract according to the demands of the project, and they will seamlessly include people from outside the traditional creative enclave. For these teams to unleash the power of AI, they need to explore, research, play, and learn a new language—Prompt engineering, which can help them deconstruct their creative process into a description that a machine can follow, and they—and the others who can learn this skill—will become a vital new part of the creative workforce: creative prompters.

Commandment 2: Honor the idea. AI isn’t creative. It can only work with what we give it. If we ask for a picture of an apple, we’ll get something serviceable. If, instead, we ask for a photograph of an apple shot with a Summilux lens on grainy film in the style of a Surrealist version of Man Ray, we’ll get grainy film in the style of a Surrealist version of Man Ray, we’ll get to a creative concept, perhaps “fruit this good is so rare it might as well be unreal,” and a strategy that animates the brand at its best, then we are on to something that may be useful to the brands in our care. In other words, AI is in thrall to the big idea, just like we are.

Commandment 3: Become a connoisseur. The internet flooded us with disintermediated information, much of it raw, irrelevant, or just plain wrong. Generative AI will drown culture in a tsunami of mediocrity. Trained on what exists, not on what has yet to be imagined, the output of generative AI will steadily regress to the mean. To counter this, we must develop a talent strategy that prizes discernment everywhere in the organization: creative, account, and strategy.

Commandment 4: Iterate. AI is force multiplier for creative expression. By treating these inorganic intelligences as navigators into the land of possibility, we can uncover dimensions of our ideas we simply did not have the time or energy to explore before. The human mind is a pattern-recognizing machine, and it is ruthlessly efficient in pruning away that which is extraneous to the task at hand. As good as creative people are at opening their minds to serendipity, even their mental hardware innately edits out countless possibilities before they ever rise to the surface of their thoughts. AI, unencumbered by meaning or judgement, can propose iterations our minds would have never found.

Commandment 5: Protect artists and brands. The output of AI trained on uncompensated work is off-limits to us. Not only does it pose legal issues for us and for our brands; it steals from creators. Since legal and ethical issues remain unresolved, we will take the most conservative approach. We will also take care with what we tell generative AI. At present, many of the engines scrape and store the content of prompts, and we will never compromise client confidentiality by being careless with them.

Commandment 6: Speed production and personalization, not creation. Much of what is done in the production phase will be automated. Production work will move from production companies to agencies where it will join personalization and versioning in being done by machine. This will increase efficiency and cut costs. It can also aggregate huge quantities of market feedback for creatives, expediting fine-tuning and cutting back on rounds of review. This leaves Ogilvy the freedom concentrate our efforts on our creativity and our skill so that we can work in partnership with AI to create unmistakable value across the spectrum of creative, from strategy to assets.

Commandment 7: Advertise your ethics. When is AI a legitimate addition to the creative process? When it is disclosed. When it doesn’t deprive creators of their rights. When it doesn’t court legal jeopardy for us or our clients. When it doesn’t deceive. We will be a beacon for how to use AI to reach new creative territory, uncover deeper human connection, and do so ethically.

As the rapid adoption of AI makes clear, we, as a culture, have decided that the present and future benefits of this technology outweigh its potential harms. Disruption is coming, and it will cut across nearly all industries. All of us will have to work with AI in order to accomplish the tasks of daily life—the work of living and the toil of earning.

Since the field is rapidly evolving and the stakes are high, enterprises need a framework for integrating AI into their businesses. AI can help interpret, interact, create, operate, and decide. Individual businesses will explore which of those functions are best suited for their needs by comparing potential business value with the feasibility of the solution and managing the change in three areas: marketing, technology, and organizational dynamics.

Society, too, must work out how to integrate AI. The technology is developing faster than our ability to adapt—especially at the level of legislation, policy, and governance. This has left the AI community policing itself and shaping the narrative around regulation, which is problematic. As the innovation and energy in AI has shifted from academia to industry, several big players have emerged: Google, Microsoft, and Meta. It appears that, for the time being at least, they will control this powerful technology, how it develops, and how we interact with it. Their for-profit status complicates the push for safer development, and that is cause for concern.