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Billions are being lit on fire like it’s a frat party in Vegas, and the guest of honor is Generative AI — the messy new roommate in marketing’s already overcrowded apartment. The hype machine is deafening.

Every keynote speaker insists this isn’t just “innovation” — it’s the rebirth of creativity itself. Meanwhile, venture capitalists are hurling money like confetti at a wedding they weren’t even invited to.

We’ve seen this movie before: the dot-com bubble, the crypto circus, the metaverse fever dream. The script never changes: VCs throw absurd sums at shiny tech, founders slap together a deck, startups sprout like weeds in a vacant lot, and every CEO says they’re going to “redefine creativity” while secretly hoping Google, Adobe, or Meta will just buy them before payroll bounces.

Now it’s AI’s turn — specifically for ad creative. The slogans are the same reheated soup: “redefine creativity,” “democratize content,” “transform connection.”

Translation: you’ll soon be pumping out twice as many LinkedIn carousels in half the time, with only a slightly higher chance that they look like a fever dream from the uncanny valley.

This isn’t vaporware optimism. It’s real money flowing into companies with almost no chance of surviving the next pricing cycle.

But here’s the punchline: the money isn’t going into real technology. It’s going into companies built on sand, praying for a buyout before the tide comes in.

The glossy brochures promise:

Reality check:

Yes, AI can scale. Yes, it can personalize. But scale without taste is spam and personalization without judgment is stalking. Left unchecked, it’s like handing the Super Bowl spot to the unpaid intern who “watches a lot of TikToks.”

The industry’s smackdown is between specialists and generalists.

Both sides are burning cash like it’s kindling. Neither has proven they can survive without investor oxygen.

Here’s the part no founder likes to admit: 90% of “AI companies” in advertising aren’t AI companies. They’re wrappers.

The thin wrappers? Easy to copy, fragile, vanish with one API pricing change.
The thick wrappers? They cling to vertical niches, proprietary data, or compliance workflows to avoid being squashed.

This isn’t a business model. It’s an arbitrage hustle — reselling someone else’s tech with prettier buttons. The moment OpenAI hikes rates 500% (and they will), or bakes your “innovation” directly into ChatGPT, your company is dead. Full stop.

A handful of companies are actually building something real.

The uncomfortable truth is that “wrapper” is not a business model.

At best, it’s a short-term arbitrage play.

At worst, it’s a countdown timer until someone upstream changes the rules.

This is why so many of these startups go dark when asked basic questions: Do you own your tech? Do you have defensibility? Can you survive past Series B? The silence isn’t strategy. It’s panic.

No, really— mutliple companies, including one thart appeared on my show, went dark when I started to ask what was the TECHNOLOGY behind their company. They don’t want the industry to know they are NOTHING.

The Great AI Creative Rush is real, intoxicating, and absolutely unsustainable in its current form. Billions are pouring into companies that don’t own their own technology, don’t have real business models, and are just praying to be acquired before the hype cycle cools.

Generative AI won’t replace human creativity. But it will expose which companies are real builders and which are just UI layers hoping for a quick flip.

The winners will know the difference between a tool and a crutch. The rest? They’re one API pricing email away from being a footnote in “What Could Have Been.”

The Elephant in the AI Room: Trust.

Humans can navigate life because we add context to what we see and hear. AI doesn’t. The big platforms skipped building a “context data layer” — and without it, AI is like a GPS with no map: it’ll wander into any dead-end alley it wants.

For marketers, that’s brutal. Out-of-context communication doesn’t just miss the mark — it actively hurts the brand.

Yes, AI is as transformative as the early Internet. But just like then, the dark side is trust gaps. The difference? This time we don’t have to tumble into the same credibility canyon adtech fell into.

Enter Contextual AI — the bridge between raw machine smarts and a brand’s unique essence. Anchor AI in brand facts, and suddenly it’s not just “generating,” it’s on-brand, reliable, and useful.

Of course, creating this contextual layer is hard and expensive — which is exactly why most AI companies didn’t bother. We did it with our AI agent, so our customers can trust their AI won’t go rogue.

Not a pitch, just reality: until context is baked in, marketers are playing with fire.

— Judy Shapiro, CEO & Co-Founder, Topic Intelligence

Wesley ter Haar, legendary Founder of .Monks, doesn’t hesitate to call generative AI and told ADOTAT that it’s a “a lasting innovation.” He points out that the hype cycle feels a lot like the late ‘90s: “In the rush to scale, some bubbles will definitely pop. No different than the dot-com bubble. The platform shift is real—there will be massive winners, lots of losers, and marketing and consumer behavior will be fundamentally different between the before and after.”

That’s not exactly a cautious outlook—it’s a warning flare. Ter Haar is saying that while everyone’s busy chasing shiny new AI toys, the real story is how the shift will permanently rewire consumer expectations and brand behavior.

When it comes to blind spots, he sees a gaping one: “I suspect most aren’t thinking through the second-order effects for their brand or business if more user behavior collapses into personal assistants.” Think about that—if Siri, Alexa, or the AI agents of tomorrow become the default gatekeepers, the entire customer journey compresses.

And the kicker? “Many companies will struggle to adapt and adopt at scale, and will find themselves operating at a completely different clock speed to their competitors that do. That difference might mean fast following becomes a more risky bet than it normally is.”

In other words: if you’re not moving at AI speed, you’re moving backward.

Let’s be real — everyone and their venture-backed cousin is building a “game-changing” AI creative tool. Most are barely more than Canva with a personality disorder. A few? They’ll actually make you money.

(Because you’re addicted to pretty things)

Bottom line: You’re not looking for a magic wand. You’re building a modular creative war chest — mix image monsters, video mills, and copy bots. The hype is loud, the burn rate is real, and the winners will be the ones that actually slot into your marketing pipeline without turning it into a science project.