- AI is transforming advertising: Generative AI is speeding up creative production, with 78% of South African marketers already using AI tools.
- Human insight drives standout work: Authentic advertising still depends on cultural understanding, audience empathy, and lived experience.
- Creative judgement can’t be automated: Strong ideas come from observation, curiosity, practice, and experience, not prompts alone.
- Strategy needs human thinking: AI analyses data, but people provide context, challenge assumptions, and shape meaningful ideas.
- The future belongs to craft plus AI: Advertising education must teach students to use AI while mastering the fundamentals of creativity and strategy. *
Advertising has always evolved alongside technology, but generative AI is accelerating that change at remarkable speed. According to the SA Social Media Landscape Report 2025, 78% of marketers in South Africa are already using AI tools, while globally 90% of CMOs say craft and design are becoming even more important to keeping brands distinctive in an AI-enabled world.
New tools have made it faster to design, produce, edit, and distribute ideas, but few have changed the creative process as fundamentally as generative AI.
Today, a campaign concept can be turned into hundreds of visual executions in minutes. Images can be created, copy refined, and variations tested before a traditional production team has even opened its first file.
But, when anyone can create anything at the click of a button, is there still value in learning how to create something meaningful?
Advertising as a craft
The answer requires us to look at advertising as a craft, rather than as a production line.
Good advertising has always been about bringing together creativity and discipline. It is about finding a meaningful insight, understanding the audience, developing an idea, connecting it to the brand, and then making the creative decisions that allow that idea to resonate.
This is particularly important in South Africa, where understanding an audience requires an appreciation of different languages, cultures, communities, and lived experiences. Data can tell us a great deal about people, and AI can help us process that information, but neither can replace the experience of paying attention to how people live, speak, behave, and see the world.
A tool might generate something that looks like a South African consumer, but recognising whether it feels authentic and culturally relevant requires a level of human understanding that cannot be generated by a prompt.
Curiosity and experience
This understanding is built through curiosity and experience. Good creatives look beyond the obvious. They notice how people behave in a shopping centre, listen to how someone describes a problem, talk to people from different generations and communities, and seek out experiences beyond their own.
They consume culture outside their usual interests and remain interested in why people do the things they do.
These experiences become the raw material for insight, but they also develop something that becomes increasingly valuable as technology makes execution easier: informed creative instinct.
An experienced creative can often recognise when something works before being able to fully explain why. They can sense when an idea has potential, when an execution is missing something, or when something technically impressive simply does not connect.
This instinct honed by studying the principles of advertising, looking at good and bad work, experimenting, receiving feedback and, importantly, making mistakes. Over time, this experience develops the judgement needed to make creative choices rather than simply accepting the options technology presents.
Challenge assumptions
The same principle applies to strategy. AI can process enormous amounts of information, but information is not understanding. A strategist still needs to question the research, challenge assumptions, understand the category, and recognise when an answer does not make sense.
This is why the craft of advertising encompasses far more than execution. It is the combination of observation, research, thinking, writing, design, storytelling, and judgement that turns information into an idea and an idea into communication that people can connect with.
Students entering the industry now are equipped with tools that will likely soon be outdated. It is their knowledge that will remain valuable. Their ability to think, question, observe, create, and make decisions will give their careers longevity and impact.
For advertising educators, this means preparing students to work with technology without allowing technology to do the thinking for them. Students need to understand how to use new tools, but they also need the foundations of the discipline: how to find an insight, develop an idea, understand an audience, and craft work until it earns its place.
These are the foundations of the craft. And they are skills worth learning, regardless of what technology comes next.
* Summary created by AI
Anthea Whitehead is Cape Town campus manager at the AAA School of Advertising.
