Did AI Transform Advertising in 2024?

2024 was billed as the year AI would grow up, finally shedding 2023’s excitable puppy experimentation phase. And on paper, it did. Holding companies threw around figures that could make any CFO faint, but dig deeper, and the impact seems less dramatic. When you spread those numbers across the workforce, you’re left with about £4.90 per person per day—the price of a decent coffee, not a creative revolution.

 

What did change in 2024 wasn’t so much the tech itself, but its perception. Caution among clients persisted, but there was a shift toward acceptance: AI is no longer feared as a threat to creativity but seen as a useful tool. Generative AI has slotted neatly into processes like storyboarding, summarising, and developing drafts. It’s helping creatives be faster, not necessarily better.

 

Despite the progress, limitations remain. AI algorithms don’t really understand cultural nuance or emotional context; they crunch numbers, not feelings. Amazing use cases - like AI personalised campaigns - exist, but they’re still novel exceptions rather than the rule. For many, AI still sits in the realm of ‘nice to have’, rather than a must-have.

"AI is no longer feared as a threat to creativity but seen as a useful tool."

Two things happened in the 1990s that changed my life: my family bought its first computer, and a few years later, I connected that PC to the internet through dial-up. Back then, it felt like the PC made the most significant difference—used for essays, spreadsheets, games—while the internet was fun for talking to people on BBSs or ICQ. Today, the internet undergirds almost everything we do, while mobile devices have displaced PCs for most day-to-day tasks. What once seemed secondary has become foundational.

AI in 2024 feels a lot like the internet in the 1990s—exciting but with unrealised potential. After a year of experimentation in 2023, many hoped AI would fully mature in 2024. And while we’ve seen a lot of progress in text, photos, video, and speech, AI’s broader power seems just over the horizon. Like the internet needing faster connections and better hardware, AI requires complementary technology, such as robust data infrastructure and more intuitive tools.

Companies are still figuring out how to work with AI effectively—more than 10 years passed between the invention of the internet and the founding of Amazon. Fifteen years passed before the dot com collapse and the rethinking of effective business models for internet businesses. Generative AI will develop more quickly. But AI will demand a similar level of reinvention. It’s not just about automating tasks or generating content—it’s about reimagining how creativity, decision-making, and customer engagement happen in an AI-powered world.  

Sure, 2024 saw significant leaps in AI, but I believe we’re still in the caveman era of this technology. We’ve stumbled upon flint, but we haven’t yet harnessed the full power of fire. When we look back at 2024 through the lens of AI, we’ll probably think, how quaint. It let us play, imagine, and pretend. It helped us learn faster—but with enough hallucinations, errors, mistakes, and generalisations that it was all… fine.

The real transformation of 2024 wasn’t in the technology itself but in how much we talked about it, figured it out, and debated its implications. That was the true shift: the year we grappled with the spark.

In 2023, AI felt like a curious novelty—something that, while promising, was a little intimidating and hard to fully understand. It was new, scary in ways and, for many, difficult to integrate into existing workflows. 

Fast forward to 2024, and the landscape has shifted. We have started to crack the code on how to effectively use AI, particularly in generating quick-turnaround concepts, whether for images, copy, or initial drafts of larger projects.

One of the most significant shifts has been our growing understanding of how to prompt AI in a way that generates useful and relevant content. What once felt like an esoteric skill, crafting the perfect input has now become an accessible part of the creative toolkit. 

This has allowed AI to assist in the early stages of ideation, enabling rapid experimentation with visual or written concepts. Instead of spending hours brainstorming or generating dozens of variations manually, we can now leverage AI to generate initial ideas in no time at all, and with minimal disruption to creative flow.

"The real transformation of 2024 wasn’t in the technology itself but in how much we talked about it, figured it out, and debated its implications. That was the true shift: the year we grappled with the spark."

While 2024 was heralded as the year AI would revolutionise industries, its adoption has been slower than anticipated. Despite massive investments and advancements in generative AI and other technologies, many brands are still hesitant to fully embrace AI. Individual AI usage, exemplified by ChatGPT's 200 million weekly active users, has soared. However, only 35% of companies have incorporated AI services into their operations, and even fewer have launched impactful AI-driven initiatives.

Several barriers hinder AI adoption. First, data management issues remain a significant challenge. Many brands struggle to integrate proprietary and third-party data securely, limiting their ability to create AI systems tailored to their needs. While AI could enhance data security and usability, scepticism and fears about privacy risks persist.

Second, bureaucratic bottlenecks and outdated policies stifle innovation. Overly cautious internal approval processes, aimed at mitigating risks, often result in prolonged delays. This rigidity discourages teams from experimenting with AI, leaving many businesses unprepared for the fast-evolving landscape.

Lastly, a lack of belief in AI's transformative potential has held brands back. The focus on generic Large Language Models (LLMs) and concerns about ethics, fuelled by high-profile missteps like Coca-Cola’s AI-generated ad and Levi’s diversity campaign, have caused scepticism. Many fail to recognise AI’s ability to address specific business challenges when paired with custom data solutions.

Despite these hurdles, 2024 has demonstrated AI’s potential in creative and operational use cases. Brands that embraced a clear strategy and roadmap, such as through innovation sprints like Rehab’s AI Navigator, have managed to overcome these barriers, unlocking meaningful impacts. 

Well, AI certainly transformed CapEx budgets in 2024! Be it agency hold cos or the big tech companies, a truly eye-watering amount of money was spent on AI in 2024. 

In the late 1980s, the phrase ‘productivity paradox’ was coined to describe the gap between the massive investments made in ‘information technology’ and the lack of measurable productivity improvements. It led Nobel laureate Robert Solow to quip that 'you can see the computer age everywhere except in the productivity statistics”. I’d argue we’re at a similar point in the cycle with AI.

In some ways, I think 2024 was the year where expectation ran into reality. I think for many – be it at work or in our personal lives – the limitations of AI became more apparent. Whereas 2023 – or at least Sam Altman – had promised nothing short of a new Copernican revolution, 2024 put the tools in more people’s hands and they were... underwhelmed? A demo can get the C-suite excited (and the CFO practically frothing at perceived efficiencies!) but the truth is for all Gen AI and LLMs’ clever tech, they have been designed to find the average, the obvious and the anodyne – not the exceptional. And so, whilst there are some areas where AI has been able to raise the floor, it hasn’t raised the ceiling.

What remains to be seen is whether the nation-state sums spent on AI in 2024 will transform 2025’s AI experience into something widespread and transformative, rather than tentative and a bit underwhelming. 

Some brands jumped in headfirst, ready to embrace the new and dance close to the sun. Others were cautious, grappling with ethical concerns, copyright issues, and, perhaps most of all, the fear of change. Yet, the AI landscape is evolving so rapidly that soon, even those on the fence will have to buy a ticket and ride the speeding train in some form or another.

As both a director and the co-founder of Made By Humans, Imagine This’ AI Artist roster, I understand the tension, but this doesn’t have to be a tug-of-war. AI isn’t here to take over (not yet); it’s a tool to complement and enhance creativity. It can act alone, support live-action projects, and open new artistic possibilities.

Ultimately, now, next year, and beyond, AI thrives on human input: creative vision, cultural context, personal experiences, and, above all, the artist's unique aesthetic and discerning taste.

2024 industry progress in AI has developed a cultural divide in agencies. Those comfortable experimenting have waved magic wands to create efficiencies and novelty. Those who are more cautious, perhaps more thoughtful, have felt distanced from the technology.

If AI was an infant in 2023, it grew to a rambunctious toddler in 2024. This was a year of great advancement, but more by way of scaffolding for what is on the horizon in the coming years. 

With all the hype around AI, it’s not surprising that some believed AI would grow to maturity faster than it has. I would argue that 2023 was the year that attracted the necessary investment to ignite meaningful momentum. But as with any major disruption, there are barriers that will keep the advancements at a pace that falls short of the hype. But the barriers will fall eventually. The potential financial upside is attractive enough that unprecedented effort, and unprecedented dollars are pouring into this domain. The dotcom revolution encountered similar barriers, such as bandwidth, data storage and access limitations, cost of data centre hardware, lack of maturity in data security, and more. But eventually they were all solved. The AI revolution is similar. And what happened in 2024 only made me more certain that the will to succeed here is unstoppable.

 

In 2024, AI has matured beyond its awkward, novelty-driven beginnings—think early iPhone apps that mimicked drinking a beer. We’re now firmly in the experimentation phase, where more agencies and clients are embracing AI as a collaborator rather than a competitor—or, at the very least, as an inevitability we need to adapt to. 

We started the year under the impression that AI would finally reach maturity and adoption. While it delivered noteworthy advances, it also highlighted the industry's uneven state of readiness to adopt it fully. Yes, Generative AI made waves in creative campaigns though: demonstrating its ability to scale personalisation and ideation. We saw brands use AI to craft thousands of tailored ad variations in real time, aligning with hyper-segmented audiences.

While this shift brought remarkable efficiencies, it often lacked true originality. AI may generate compelling outputs, but looking back, many campaigns had a tendency to come across as sterile or predictable and clearly lacked a strong strategic backbone.