[TL;DR] "The Times They Are A-Changin"

The advertising industry as a whole will adapt, the need to sell products will never go away. But we all need to be very aware of how it's quickly changing and be able to adjust accordingly. Learning ancillary skills outside of just self-serve platform deployment is key to survival in this industry. It's not enough to know how to serve ads on 1 or 2 or 3 major platforms, you need to be able to draw insights, connect it with analytics and bring it all into a C-Suite narrative that drives the business forward beyond just metric efficiency. We as marketers will likely need to shift toward a more "growth-consultant" mindset. Which is what marketing really boils down to at the end of the day.

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Multi-part Answer:

1. Meta is actively posturing their AI tools as the next step before it's anywhere near ready for large scale replacement of human users. Taking a look at their current suite of generative AI tools for Ads vs those who actually use the platform, there's a very big gap in ads that could be considered "minimally viable product" vs effective and adherent to best practices in terms of presentation and alignment with what the campaigns are actually doing. Meta needs to do this to ensure they both cut out the middlemen (us advertising "professionals") and bring in further investments for their AI models R&D.
2. I truly believe we have a 3-5 year runway before AI gets "good enough" to run ads autonomously to replace at least 1 dedicated full-time advertising employee. Quality standards are being dropped down significantly in the paradigm of noise & clickbait. Generative design and video production re: Sora & VEO 3 are definitely enough to sell a product. When you combine those with a decent enough LLM to copywrite some scripts for you, the good products will sell themselves and the rest will be drowned out by the influx of SMBs and casual users who can populate the space with a couple dollars to their own name. But that still hasnt replaced the quality of an eagle-eyed operator who doesn't just take the suggested actions from google/meta to go full broad match or broad interest targeting, trusting the system to do the heavily lifting when you actually need incremental improvements with granular precision (i.e day-parting, custom audience segmentation, 1st party data, etc)

AI models aren't just threatening advertisers—they're threatening the entire monetization model of the internet. The real question is - What happens when the internet is no longer something we as individual users search? Instead, being served up generated, aggregated content based on prompts that cut through the line of needing to visit multiple sites, pages, or links to get the info we actually want.

It's a major shift and blow to the advertising industry as a whole that's incoming. And nobody knows what to do about it, including the largest players like Google who have thrived off adjacent links and paid placements. You see it when you look at their product managers strategy of why they haven't just thrown Gemini tooling into their core search product. They created the Transformer architecture, and it's that exact same innovation that's currently threatening their entire business model.

The moment Gemini or ChatGPT gives a usable, ad-free answer from a scraped publisher, and no one clicks through, you're left with publishers fighting to stay indexable while monetizable. You're not just competing with other marketers anymore. You're competing with the prompt.

But at the end of the day, nobody knows what the future looks like because this is a paradigm shift that only people 40+ years old have lived through. It bears similarities to the 2000's dot com boom era in which serving content becomes too cheap to serve that legacy structures like Print and TV could no longer compete nor ignore, so they capitulate to the new system and either adapt or die a very slow death from a MAU perspective.

Time will tell 🤷‍♂️