Making things that make things

"In the Intelligence Age, making "the thing" is no longer the endgame. We're evolving from creating fixed assets to designing and building adaptive, generative systems that unify brand, product, and marketing. We're creating brands that can fuel new types of digital interfaces that adapt based on user contexts, and content that can be generated and individualized at scale. Our job isn't just to deliver assets anymore. It's to build the engines that create them, to make things that make things."

"The advertising industry has always been in the business of making things, such as the OOH billboard, the 30-second spot, the snappy social post, the standard website: final, finite assets polished and pushed into the world. Agencies were paid, often by the hour, for producing final versions of these things and then moved on to the next project. Even with generative AI entering the picture, much of the conversation remains focused on making those same things faster or cheaper."

"Traditional marketing is built on dead-end assets and repetitive short-term investment: Launch a campaign, run it for six weeks, start over. It's a model the industry is familiar with, but it is outdated and not creating enough value long term. AI allows us to evolve beyond this model and engage consumers in unprecedented ways. Take, for example, my son and I shopping for new Nike sneakers."

Advertising historically produced fixed, final assets—billboards, 30-second spots, social posts, and websites—that agencies created, polished, and delivered before moving on. Generative AI shifts the focus from faster production of the same assets to building adaptive, generative systems that unify brand, product, and marketing. Brands can now power digital interfaces that adapt to user context and generate individualized content at scale, enabling diverse experiences for different people. Traditional campaign cycles based on dead-end assets are outdated and fail to create long-term value. The new role is to build engines that continuously produce contextualized creative experiences.

Read at Fast Company