Uche Cecil Izuora
Advertising has always sold on one currency: an idea nobody else had thought of yet. That currency is now being tested by a machine that can generate a version of almost any idea in seconds. Generative AI has moved from a novelty in agency workflows to daily infrastructure, writing copy, generating visuals, running thousands of ad variations, and optimizing campaigns in real time. What it has not done, at least not yet, is settle the question of what advertising actually needs a human being for.
That question, human intelligence versus artificial intelligence, is not a hypothetical one anymore. It is the live tension running through boardrooms, agency floors, and industry conferences worldwide: which parts of advertising can be handed to a machine without losing what made the work valuable in the first place? The emerging answer, echoed by senior figures across markets, is that AI is absorbing the mechanical half of the job, production, iteration, testing at scale, while the strategic and creative half, the part that requires judgement, cultural fluency, and original thought, remains stubbornly human. The evolution isn’t a contest with a winner. It’s a redrawing of where the line between execution and origination sits.
Tomiwa Aladekomo, Chief Executive Officer of Big Cabal Media, puts it plainly: AI is changing the rules of the industry, but human creativity remains its biggest differentiator. He has urged agencies to spend less energy chasing the technology itself and more on the value they create for clients, describing AI as a tool meant to support the creative process rather than replace it, unable, in its framing, to substitute for human intuition, cultural understanding, and the ability to originate an idea from nothing.
Dr. Meksley Nwagboh, Chief Marketing Officer at Fidelity Bank Plc, frames the same disruption as an opening rather than a threat. Agencies able to blend data, technology, and human judgement, he says, will be the ones positioned to meet a marketplace where consumers increasingly demand authenticity and brand experiences that mean something. The transformation, in his reading, is a chance for agencies to rebuild how they create value, not a countdown to their obsolescence.
That tension, technology as an amplifier of human judgement rather than a substitute for it , is not confined to only one market. Weeks earlier, more than 13,000 marketing and advertising leaders gathered at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity in France, the industry’s largest global gathering, to wrestle with an almost identical question. The tone there had shifted from the AI optimism of the prior year toward something closer to caution. Polaroid creative director Patricia Varella told the festival that an industry optimizing purely for efficiency risks building a system that quietly destroys its own creativity.
Chipotle’s Chief Brand Officer, Fernando Machado, pushed back against treating creativity as a soft metric, calling it a dollar multiplier on investment that drives measurable results. Cannes Lions CEO Simon Cook opened the festival by describing creativity not as a luxury in a difficult economic climate, but as a necessity.
Analysis coming out of Cannes from McKinsey’s media and advertising practice captured a theme that closely mirrors what Aladekomo and Nwagboh have argued: AI is commoditizing the execution side of advertising, the production, the testing, the iteration, which makes originality and cultural fluency more valuable competitive advantages, not less.
The scale of the shift is reflected in the money moving into it. Estimates of the global AI-in-marketing and advertising market for 2026 vary widely depending on the research firm, ranging roughly from the mid-$30 billions to mid-$60 billions, with most forecasts converging above $100 billion by 2028. Global digital ad spending as a whole is projected to cross $700 billion in 2026, with AI-driven channels among the fastest-growing segments of that spend.
What emerges from these voices, in Nigeria and on the Croisette, is not a defence of the old advertising model against the new one, but an argument for where the line between human and machine should sit. Agencies are being asked to treat AI as infrastructure, fast, scalable, capable of handling the mechanical parts of the job, while defending the parts of the craft that depend on judgement, taste, and an understanding of culture that no model has lived through.
The industry’s evolution, then, isn’t a contest to be won by one side. It’s a redrawing of the boundary between what machines execute and what only human intelligence can originate.