The Creative Crisis Nobody Wants to Admit
Advertising agencies will not die off. They are casting off skin, however–at a furious rate. With generative AI inundating the creative process with pre-trained creativity, brands are reconsidering the reliance on large, slow agencies. Clients are now turning to tools such as Midjourney to provide visuals, ChatGPT to provide taglines, Maya to provide 3D images, and Runway to produce low budget advertisements, rather than having extensive brainstorming sessions. What is the point in paying through the nose for layers of planners and creatives when prompt can do the hard work?
That is the toxic question dogging the WPP’s AI, the largest ad conglomerate in the world. As a retaliatory move, they embrace something no one could have anticipated; they head inwards and train their own AI agents. Their goal? Just so that it can redefine the way creativity is being delivered in the realm of automation and diminishing attention.
From Collapse to Reinvention: Why WPP Had to Move Fast
This resulted in the agencies holding companies experiencing an average of 6.2 percent decline in client revenue in 2024 alone as brands increasingly went in house with AI-aided content (source: WARC Global Ad Trends). The traditional system in which long lead times, excessive expenses and overly theoretical proposals ruled the roost is breaking at the stake.
Customers such as Nike or Unilever are already experimenting to create their own internal generative AI labs, and young companies are running viral campaigns on TikTok without any agency involvement. In the case of WPP the decision was very easy, either you lead in the AI transformation or you end up being played in the dust.
By mid-2025, WPP’s AI had announced Creative OS, a framework inside the firm using AI to merge data analysis, content production, creative experimentation, and market prediction. It is made, not only fast, but contextual and original.
Inside Creative OS: WPP’s New Brainpower
Creative OS is not any other dashboard. It is a digital accompaniment of intelligence that frames ideation and delivery.
- that reads past campaign brand tone and visual DNA.
- It pre-crawls pre rollout performance.
- It develops innovative forms in line with the current cultural feeling.
Stephan Pretorius, WPP’s AI chief technology officer, has told Campaign Magazine, it is not using AI to produce generic content. We are feeding models into the intricacies of each brand, therefore it is like tapping into the mind of a strategist that has already understood your voice.
One of the best application scenarios? The Spring 2025 EV campaign of Ford Europe. WPP filtered more than 12,000+ posts in Youtube and electric vehicle forums using Creative OS. The AI revealed some pain points (range anxiety, charging confusion and design fatigue) and proposed crafty messaging directly related to these insights. The result? 2.5-fold increase in engagement and 34 percent better conversion rate higher than their 2023 campaign.
Creative or Programmatic? Why This Tension Still Matters
Indeed, automation is exhilarating. But is it human to evoke emotion, irony or cultural tone to AI? These are the questions that veteran copywriters and creative directors have sleepless nights over.
Take the example of the anti-vaping PSA made with the help of AI and published by a nonprofit at the beginning of 2025. It was technically polished but lacked an emotional connection, audiences were describing it as soulless and the group was not able to push the campaign through a backlash.
WPP’s AI appears to have realized this threat. They are not something to do with complete automation. Rather, they are adopting AI as an artful co-pilot. Case in point: one of the luxury fashion brands got in touch with WPP AI agencies asking to assist them in launching a Ramadan culturally-sensitive campaign. The implied linguistic variations in the Gulf and Southeast Asian markets were reflected because Creative OS brought out low-key variations in the linguistic context of the region which enabled the model to adopt adoption of visual metaphors that respected each society.
In the words of Tina Kaur who heads the strategic business in MENA at WPP:
It was the blueprint provided by AI that was missing the touch of humanity with their empathy to choose which would pleasantly surprise and which would insult.
Expert Take: The Blueprint for Agency Survival?
Dr. Lillian Chow, a researcher at MIT Media Lab in AI + Creativity, says what WPP is doing is a catalyst or realignment in the future survival of ad agencies in this AI wave.
They are inculcating the intelligence into the ideation point. It is not the matter of efficiency, but scalability of strategic intuition. That is something the industry has been lacking up to date.
Everyone is not either on board, of course. There are internal WPP teams which are afraid that the humanity of craft-based-advertising will be mixed up with AI. The others are concerned with job redundancy. However, according to industry observers, this trend may compel agencies to transform into creative systems designers besides being content publishers.
Final Thought: What Happens to Creativity When Machines Assist?
In case WPP succeeds, they can become the pattern which all big holding companies might use. In case they do, then it will confirm all the fears agencies have on their future. The bigger question is philosophical: How do machines, trained on our old notions, enhance our understanding of creativity
Perhaps the superior agencies won t be the ones that deny AI or adopt it fanatically – but those that edit that which they embrace. As the innovating process gets into a collaborator age, advantage can go to thinkers able to incorporate synthetic idea with human flawlessness.
“Therefore, the next time you notice an excellent campaign in your feed, you should ask: Did a team create it? Did a machine that understands us trigger it?”