We are currently witnessing a shift where productivity is rapidly becoming more important than performance, and it is a shift that threatens to turn the entire adland machine into a high-speed factory for the remarkably average.
A dichotomy between efficiency and effectiveness has always existed in advertising, but AI has turned this into a canyon. In the creative world, the promise is alluring: why pay for a week of human ideation when a machine can spit out a thousand variations of a banner in seconds? It’s the industrialisation of creativity, but it misses the point entirely.
Choosing a creative agency based on how efficiently they can produce assets is like choosing a surgeon based on how fast they can stitch; speed is nice, but I’d rather they actually fixed the problem. A million efficiently produced, AI-generated adverts that nobody wants to look at are still worth exactly zero. You are effectively paying for the privilege of being, very efficiently, ignored.
The media side of the house is no better, though they tend to hide their efficiency obsession behind more complicated terminology, aka jargon. In media, the ‘black box’ has moved from programmatic algorithms to AI-driven planning tools that promise to find the ‘cheapest’ reach with surgical precision. But again, we’re confusing the tool with the result.
Comparing these AI black boxes during a tender has largely become a fool’s errand because, in the dark, every cat is grey. If you choose a media partner because their proprietary AI promises to shave 20% off your CPMs through ‘efficiency’, you’re often just buying a faster way to put your brand in front of bots or in the digital equivalent of a bargain bin. The best tradesman is never the one with the shiniest tools; it’s the one who produces the most outstanding results, yet we are increasingly focused on the shine.
Our growing obsession with demonstrating efficiency during the tender process is underwritten by a fundamental misunderstanding of how value is created. At TrinityP3 we see more and more pitches where agencies are asked to prove how much faster they can be, rather than how much better they can be. We often have to remind client that there’s a risk of a race to the bottom where the prize is a contract that neither side can actually fulfil profitably.
The reality is that the most efficient advertising agency in the world is a false economy if they’re delivering a poor product. If you buy the cheapest, most productive delivery of a strategy that doesn’t work, you haven’t saved money; you’ve just, very efficiently, set fire to your marketing budget.
What’s even more galling is that agency productivity is almost impossible to assess at the pitch stage anyway.
Why?
Because an agency’s efficiency is directly dictated by the work practices and culture of the client and their teams. You could hire a team of literal geniuses augmented by the most powerful AI on the planet, but if your marketing team requires fourteen stages of approval and insists on three ‘pre-meetings’ before every ‘alignment session’, that agency will be slowed to a crawl.
It is exactly like hitching a thoroughbred racehorse to a heavy milk cart and then standing there with a stopwatch wondering why the deliveries aren't faster. The horse isn't the problem; it’s the cart itself, its significant weight and of course the person holding the reins.
Instead of this efficiency-first madness, we should be looking for capability and performance. Value is derived by choosing the best performing agency first, the ones who can actually solve the business problem, whether that’s through a brilliant creative leap or a sophisticated media strategy.
Once you have the right people on board, then you can sit down and implement a process for improving productivity. That’s when you use AI to strip away the ‘data janitor’ tasks, the boring administrative drudge, and the repetitive resizing that kills morale. Smart marketers optimise the way the marketing team and the various agencies on the roster work together, but they keep the focus firmly on the results.
While new technology like AI is undoubtedly exciting, allowing it to become the dominant consideration in choosing a partner means you value ‘more and faster’ over what actually matters. It’s paying lip service to the idea that marketing contributes to growth while actually treating it like a cost to be minimised.
Choosing an agency because they have a proprietary AI "black box" that promises a 30% reduction in the cost of ad impressions or production hours is just paying lip service to the idea of marketing. It’s a way for executives to tick a box and say they’ve "embraced the future" without having to do the hard work of actually building a brand.
If we continue down this path, we aren't creating a more efficient industry; we’re simply building a faster way to be ignored by consumers. In the end, if the work doesn't work, it doesn't matter how efficiently you do it. We need to stop obsessing over the shiniest tools and start remembering that the goal is to win the race, not just to have the most efficient way of losing it.
Woolley Marketing is a monthly column for Campaign Asia-Pacific, penned by Darren Woolley, the founder and global CEO of Trinity P3. The illustration accompanying this piece is by Dennis Flad, a Zurich-based marketing and advertising veteran.
