• by Cory Treffiletti , Featured Contributor, October 8, 2025

AI is the buzziest of buzzwords, so you must assume it makes a great hook for a headline, right?  And you literally can’t spell advertising without AI.  The fact is, advertising has always adopted digital technology, algorithms, data, machine learning and now artificial intelligence.  As an industry, we adopt these innovations faster than most other industries because we need to stay at the forefront of new technology in order to remain relevant.

I love advertising, so by no means am I disparaging it. Advertising works best when it is paving the way for the mainstream zeitgeist, and right now that zeitgeist is enthralled with AI, both for the positives and the negatives of it. 

Consumers want to talk about AI, and advertising not only uses the technology to create ways of bringing a message to market, but we are also talking about AI as a differentiator for our brands.  At least 50% of the campaigns I see on TV these days mention AI in one form or another.  AI is a tool to hook the audience as much as it is a tool for us to advance the way we do business. 

AI and its predecessors have been in advertising since around 1998.  Internet advertising really began in 1995-1996 and took a large leap forward from basic display to things like search and the earliest stages of video around 1998-1999.  The biggest leap forward came around 2005, when the industry adopted the term Big Data as a rallying cry and data became the “oil” of the industry. 

AI works because of the data that feeds into it, and you would be hard-pressed to find any industry that creates nearly as much data as does the advertising industry.  Every digital touchpoint on the internet -- and off it -- creates another data point that can be used to automate and optimize an interaction, for better or for worse.

The more data available, the more automated those decisions can become.  AI can allow for hyper-personalization and advanced audience discovery.  AI can also affect ad creative, not just by automating the creation, but automating testing, creation and delivery into a shortened cycle that borders on truly real-time. 

All these advancements create what I am starting to refer to as the role of a media engineer,  the next evolutionary step up from media strategist, media planner and media buyer.  Media engineers simply know how media works and can craft a plan using tools including AI to execute, optimize and deliver results for clients.  Media engineering is the ultimate scientific approach to media planning and buying, and represents the end state of the media agency.  

The media engineer is the role that most agency holding companies didn't know they needed -- but will quickly begin to hire in the coming weeks and months.  They will be retraining their current media teams to build a stack of tools that offer them a point of differentiation from their competition. 

It will no longer be about the data, because data is an entirely commoditized object now.  We all have access to the same data.  The data is simply the gasoline to fuel the engine of the stack, and it comes down to how somebody uses the stack. 

In auto racing, everybody uses the same fuel.  It’s the drivers of the machines that make the difference. AI is the machine, and the media engineers will be the drivers.   

If you and I enter the same prompts into an AI at step 1, we get similar results.  What happens when you continue to engage the AI, asking more questions and inputting more prompts, is how  one result can be different from the next.  The expertise on how to use those prompts and tools is where media engineers will see success.

This is the future of media, and that future is right around the corner.  You might even argue that the future is now.

It’s a crazy time to be in this industry, again.