Advertising needs human intelligence to make it sing

*This article first appeared in The Times on Tuesday May 6th 2025*

"If only everything in life was as reliable as a Volkswagen”, “Heineken refreshes the parts other beers cannot reach” and “Just Do It”. All big ideas that drew me to the advertising industry when I started in 1989. Ideas that leapt out and snagged in the memory. Ideas that inspired consistently powerful advertising campaigns and built lasting brands. They captured what those brands stood for (reliability, refreshment, action), creating distinctiveness, attracting customers and justifying price premiums.

Take Levi’s. Launching its 501 jeans in the UK, there was little to choose between them and rivals such as Lee and Wrangler, but when, to the strains of I Heard It Through the Grapevine, Nick Kamen unbuttoned his 501s in that famous launderette commercial, sales shot up 800 per cent and 501s commanded £30, when the market was priced at sub-£20. That’s brand building.

This week, Mark Zuckerberg (https://www.thetimes.com/article/why-mark-zuckerberg-on-trial-meta-2v3krd7ld) effectively announced the end of the industry behind these ideas. Thanks to AI, he said, platforms such as Meta will be able to take a client’s desired business outcome, and generate the requisite creative content that will drive those commercial results. Creativity becomes automated, transactional. No advertising agency required.

Up to a point, he’s right. AI is transforming advertising. That’s why at WPP, we’ve invested over £500 million in the world’s leading AI marketing platform (https://www.thetimes.com/article/cc18b682-56af-4239-81cb-f0e0e338124b). It creates copy, images, and increasingly video, in endless permutations. It analyses and finds those audiences most likely to grow your business. It measures, learns and optimises, taking hours out of previously labour-intensive tasks, enhancing sales and the performance of marketing.

Give AI another decade though, and it still won’t come up with the truly big ideas that brands have been built on over the past 30 years. It won’t generate “You know when you’ve been Tango’d” or “You’re not you when you’re hungry for Snickers”. Generative AI doesn’t do leaps of imagination, it’s trained on vast data sets, finding the patterns and relationships that allow it to create ostensibly “new” content, but these are just riffs on what’s gone before. Artificial intelligence needs human intelligence to make it sing.

Snickers is a great example: when our team at The & Partnership (https://www.thetimes.com/business-money/companies/article/wpp-takes-full-control-of-the-and-partnership-c72b67np9)partnered the brand with José Mourinho for last year’s Euros, we created a José avatar who fans could use to playfully berate their mates for daft “own goals” (“… maybe you just need a Snickers”). Perfectly tuned to the social media conversation around the tournament, clever AI meant that every video gave the appearance of a personal message from José himself. But the original idea? That was down to the ingenuity of a living, breathing creative team.

Having proudly worked with established global brands for the past three decades, I’ve spent the past few years testing everything I’ve learnt on start-ups of my own. “Hard to make, easy to drink” is the idea for Hawkstone, where we consistently tell the story of hard-working British farmers toiling to grow spring barley in difficult circumstances to make a delicious beer the rest of us can enjoy (with more than a little help from Jeremy Clarkson. “Intelligent style, now and forever” encapsulates everything my wife’s Me+Em brand stands for: timeless, well thought-through design for smart busy women. It doesn’t just tell you what to write at the bottom of the advertising — it guides the whole philosophy of the business.

So, returning to work today, I remain hugely excited by all the ways AI accelerates insight, targeting, production and deployment across our marketing plans, but I’m also reassured that dreaming up big brand and advertising ideas is still as important and resolutely human endeavour in 2025, as it was in 1989. I think we have to co-exist for a little longer, Mark…

Johnny Hornby is founder and chief executive of The&Partnership advertising agency