If your agency hasn’t figured out that AI is a powerful tool that will make work for clients far more effective , “your dead.” 

So proclaimed Stagwell vice chairman David Sable at a Monday morning Advertising Week New York session where he conversed with Cloe Fang, head of partnerships at OpenArt AI. 

He noted that the day he began work in advertising 50 years ago he was told that “everything has changed” in the business. Advertising “has always been at the leading edge of change,” he added. 

That’s true now with AI as the lead change agent, something that Adland must embrace and control.  

“This isn’t Roblox,” Sable opined, talking about the virtual ecosystem that took the industry by storm a few years back in a very faddish way. “That was all that was going to be left and that was how all products would be sold,” which he noted turned out to be “nonsense.” 

While AI will help people in advertising express their creative ideas in more ways than ever before, the technology will never supplant human creativity, he said. 

And the industry needs to stop being so “self-conscious” about its use of AI. Is it necessary to tag commercials with a credit line to AI? Not in Sable’s opinion. “We never credited CGI or other special effects,” he said. “We just did it.” 

Technology has always driven human advancements, he said, and it always will. “You can’t be afraid of it, just ride the wave.” 

His advice for young people thinking about advertising as a career: “It’s a great industry,” despite the trade press declaring its death every so often. Advertising “runs the world,” he asserted.