Every few years, a new technology sweeps through advertising, promising to rewrite the rules. We’ve lived through the CMS boom that made every brand a publisher. We’ve watched QR codes rise, fall, and rise again. We’ve seen augmented reality dazzle award juries while confusing consumers. We’ve drowned in dashboards during the big data gold rush.

The pattern is always the same: hype, overuse, disappointment, integration. And right now, AI and Dynamic Creative Optimization are running that same play.

Both tools have incredible potential. But in the scramble to deploy them, brands are swapping substance for speed. They’re flooding feeds with endless creative variations that say nothing universal, chasing micro-metrics at the expense of meaning. The result: advertising that is technically “personal” but emotionally empty.

The future will not belong to the brands that simply master the tools. It will belong to the ones who use them to serve a single, sharp idea — delivered with clarity, creativity, and the discipline to do less, but better.
 

The State of Play: AI and DCO in 2025 

Marketers are seduced by the promise: faster creative cycles, deeper personalization, perfect targeting. An AI can write a headline in seconds. A DCO platform can swap an image for a thousand audience segments before lunch. Efficiency feels like progress.

But efficiency without direction is just noise. We’re seeing ads optimized for tiny signals -- the sneakers you hovered over, the ingredient you liked while the bigger story goes untold. Campaigns fracture into hundreds of small messages, each relevant in isolation, none powerful enough to define the brand.
 

Whats getting Lost

When technology leads, the fundamentals fall away. Strategy becomes a list of targeting parameters instead of a north star. Messaging gets chopped into fragments, each talking to a preference but none to a shared human truth. Creative ambition narrows to safe, iterative tweaks. Media planning becomes purely algorithmic, stripped of cultural context or impact.

The paradox is this: the more we “personalize,” the less we connect. The brands that cut through are built on genuine human insight, expressed with clarity and authenticity, not stitched together from endless micro-variations that only mimic connection.

The Fundamentals That Still Win 

The brands that break through aren’t the ones doing the most they’re the ones doing the right things with ruthless clarity.

They start with a sharp strategic insight grounded in the culture, the category, and the customer. They distill that into a message so clear it can survive any format, any channel, any execution. They develop creative ideas bold enough to earn attention and simple enough to remember. And they place those ideas in media environments that amplify them, not just deliver impressions.

The Bridge Model: Where AI and DCO Belong

AI and DCO can absolutely make this stronger, if they know their place. They are not the idea. They are the accelerants.

Use AI to mine patterns in behavior, culture, and conversation that sharpen the strategic brief. Use DCO to pressure-test different expressions of the same big idea, not to churn a hundred disconnected messages. Use predictive analytics to place work where it will be most contextually powerful, not just cheapest to serve.

When the machine serves the message, and the message is worth amplifying,  that’s when the technology delivers on its promise.

What Leaders Need to Do Now

Stop measuring success by speed and volume alone. Ask if every output, whether it’s one execution or one thousand, ladders back to the core brand idea. Reinvest in the strategic and creative leadership that can set that idea. Put guardrails on when and how automation is used. Train teams to brief with precision, not just serve prompts.

And above all, embrace the discipline of doing less. The future will reward those who focus, not those who flood.

Closing: The Human + Machine Future

AI and DCO aren’t the enemy, but they’re not the hero either. The hero is still the idea and the people behind them. The role of the machine is to help that idea travel further and hit harder, without losing its clarity or soul.

We’ve seen this movie before. We know how it ends when we let the tools lead in place of authentic ideas. This time, we have the chance to write a better ending.

-Frank Torok