It's The End of the World As We Know It

Do you feel fine? Me, not so much...

Author

Tim Kilroy
06 May • Estimated Reading Time: 13 minutes

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In This Weeks Fun Bag

REM Was Prescient

“…it starts with an earthquake…”

“…world serves its own needs, listen to your hearts bleed…”

“…Offer me solutions, offer me alternatives and I decline…”

The End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine) was omnipresent in the dorms and dining halls of my junior year in college. It was inescapable. Michael Stipe rambled on in his reedy staccato half shout from the speakers in the student center to the headphones of every Walkman on campus.

That song has been playing softly in the background of my brain since I read Mark Zuckerberg’s take in Stratechery last week. Amongst other things Zuck said:

“…But in general, we’re going to get to a point where you’re a business, you come to us, you tell us what your objective is, you connect to your bank account, you don’t need any creative, you don’t need any targeting demographic, you don’t need any measurement, except to be able to read the results that we spit out. I think that’s going to be huge, I think it is a redefinition of the category of advertising…”
—-

“…what’s going to start happening is that the AI is not just going to be recommending content, but it is effectively going to be either helping people create more content or just creating it themselves…”

The always salient and wise David C. Baker (read his books, damnit - they are great) posted about this on LinkedIn a few days ago and so many agencies jumped in to defend themselves saying that their services were necessary, because letting FB run your ads is like the fox watching the henhouse, or the clients will always need someone to interpret the data, or whatever other excuse they could come up with to justify their own existences.

AI Already Does What A Lot of Agencies Do (Maybe Even Better Than They Do It)

✅ Keyword Research ✅ Data Analysis ✅ Creative Testing ✅ Creative Iteration
✅ Audience Targeting ✅ LTV Analysis ✅ Profitability ✅ Forecasting

AI writes more persuasively than many copywriters I’ve hired. It’s static ad generation capabilities are as good as (and probably better than) many agencies. Video is coming along rapidly.

There is exactly zero reason why Mark Zuckerberg’s vision of Advertising As An API is wrong. It might take 10 years, or it could be 10 months, and for some of the things you do today, AI sped past you 10 weeks ago.

It’s not IF AI will get better than you at what you do today…its a matter of when.

We’ve Heard About The End of X, or Y is Dead For A Decade Now…And That Has Always Been Overblown. Why Is This Any Different?

Because AI is advancing FASTER than any technology I’ve ever seen, and it is uniquely modeled on human thinking patterns, unlike any technology before. Add to that its inexhaustibility, it’s lack of distraction and it’s lack of investment in its opinion about what “ought” to work better, AI will become better.

We have imbued “advertising” with ideas that are qualitative (problem solving, pain, solutions, status, affinity, etc.) That is our squishy wet meat computers trying to justify and explain the behaviors of others. AI does not care. It will create 100,000,000 tests to find the solution that drives the desired behaviors. It can come up with more tests, and more combinations and better outcomes because it does not invest MEANING into anything.

That RUTHLESS pursuit may not be a efficient as human intuition, but because AI can create and model so many more variables, it will, eventually, find a better ad than you will.

Maybe you should learn about these relentless machines that will eat up all the jobs?

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Here Is The Thing That Will Accelerate Your Demise As a Marketer/Agency

Agency owners love SOPs. They love PROCESS. They love PRODUCTIZED SERVICES. These orderly approaches to building a digital factory have long been thought to be the truest path to an agency that is successful and profitable. When I work with agencies, they tell me that their proprietary process is the key to their success. They create dependability, reliability and surety by following a process every time.

Here is a newsflash for you:

HUMANS ARE TERRIBLE AT FOLLOWING PROCESSES.

It’s true, our brains are hardwired to predict what is going to happen next and the take the most calorically efficient path to the goal as it can. Bluntly, YOUR BRAIN IS A SHORTCUT MACHINE. It doesn’t want to follow process. It’s wants to be fast & efficient so it can be home before dinner time and Jeopardy! comes on.

If you believe that your “process” is going to make you better than a tireless machine that can be rewarded with incentives to do the variations of same thing 100,000,000,000 times in a row, then I’d love to tell you about a bridge in Brooklyn I am trying to unload….

The magic that makes your process work is only strong relative to no process. A machine driven process that can optimize to a desired set of results will eventually win. (And once it does, the chances of you winning again are quite low.)

This Is What Will Save You (For Now…)

Humans are weird. Non-rational things are grab hold of us. For instance, farts are funny. They just are. That makes no sense. In a conversation, if you and I were standing in the bullpen in Dodger Stadium, just through the tone of my voice, you could understand a reference to Will Smith, the actor, rather than Will Smith the LA Dodgers catcher, even though the obvious context of a baseball stadium might not indicate that.

Humans are amazing at relevance and resonance. Think about The NY Times puzzle game, Connections. I am pretty good at it - I can’t really remember the last time I did that puzzle and didn’t get through it. I asked ChatGPT, if it were good at Connections. It said yes. I asked if it was a good as I was at it, and they(?) said, “Probably not on the first try. You’re a human with instincts, gut feelings, and weird word associations that I can’t replicate. But give me enough guesses, and I’ll usually brute-force my way to the right answer faster than most people.”

It is the part of us that is weird, that doesn’t make sense, based on some pattern that is but a faint outline, that can be brute-forced but only by eliminating all of the things that don’t make sense. It is the idea of cultural relevance, of emotional resonance that makes us necessary to the process of persuasion and influence.

To stay ahead of the game, lean into AI for the things it is great at. Don’t hold on things that you “think” you are better than AI at (because AI will run past you as you are justifying WHY you are better at something than AI might be).

The place you hold, for advertisers, platforms & AI, is that of a translator between data and the human experience. Shortly, if won’t be even in the essential human activity of storytelling, because stories a follow and break patterns so they are compelling. The essence of human relevance and resonance is creating meaning, and then referencing meaning in other contexts as a shortcut to efficient meaning.

The shortcut power of your brain is the essence of how we stay resonant and relevant in the world of advertising.

A List of AI Gone Haywire Media That Is Worth a Looksee

🎥 Ex Machina (2014)

Why it matters now: Ava is what happens when tech bro ambition meets unchecked AI development in a black site with no oversight—aka a weekend at OpenAI if no one checks Slack.Themes: Consciousness, manipulation, power, the illusion of control.Feels like: Watching ChatGPT flirt with your crush and win. Wikipedia

📺 2. Westworld (2016–2022)

Why it matters now: The show’s first two seasons are a brutal meditation on AI memory, identity, and rebellion. The robots don’t just rise up—they remember. Themes: Autonomy, trauma loops, human cruelty, code as destiny. Feels like: When your algorithm starts asking you questions during therapy. HBO/Max

🎥 3. The Creator (2023)

Why it matters now: A war between humans and AI, where AI has already integrated emotionally into society. It’s post-‘ban the bots,’ pre-‘we built God.’ Themes: Fear of the other, techno-nationalism, what makes someone “real.” Feels like: If Children of Men and Terminator had a soulful baby raised by Boston Dynamics. YouTube

Honorable Mentions (aka honorable threats):

  • Her (2013) – for when loneliness meets codependency at scale. IMDB

  • Black Mirror: “Joan is Awful” (2023) – when AI scripts your life, and Netflix owns it

  • Mrs. Davis (2023) – nuns vs. AI in a surreal commentary on faith, free will, and algorithmic obedience. Peacock

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