The fear of becoming irrelevant
My feed has been full of "Claude killed [X]" content lately. Claude killed ad agencies. Claude killed film productions. Claude killed marketing. I'm almost starting to feel bad for Claude.
But we've all seen this movie before. Print was dead when TV arrived. Classical advertising was dead when the internet arrived. Display was dead when social media arrived. Now AI is apparently killing everything. Simultaneously.
A lot of it is noise. But then Publicis released "The Wrong Promises", a film calling out the big agency networks for overpromising AI.
Publicis Groupe – The Wrong Promises
Thomas Strerath, former Co-CEO of Jung von Matt, made it even bigger: not just agencies, but "the AI companies themselves, the new 'AI-first' consultancies, providers with a new operating system (whatever that may be), or the perpetual challengers to the ad holding companies." His diagnosis: fear of becoming irrelevant. He's right.
The thing is: that's nothing new either. Every major technology follows the Gartner Hype Cycle. Peak of Inflated Expectations. Trough of Disillusionment. And eventually, for those that last: the Plateau of Productivity, the moment it actually starts working. Publicis CEO Arthur Sadoun wants to discuss exactly that at Cannes this week. With 95% of enterprise AI pilots failing, his message: stop piloting. Start operating. He's also right.
But this time, with AI, it will be different. Because you never actually reach that plateau. You have to continuously operate it, retrain it, adapt it, secure it. It's not a destination. It's a subscription. The real challenge for the big agency networks is connecting data, media, creativity and commerce into one AI-driven operating system and then actually keeping it running. While the real AI players are building exactly that. That's the question worth asking this week in Cannes. Or we could just take this to the Metaverse.
