“Creative generation for ads is probably the least valuable place to apply AI. What you really care about is the concept. What I see people using AI well for is creative prospecting — pulling competitors' ads and using an LLM agent to synthesize what's working. That would have been a full-time job three years ago.”

AI's real marketing value is creative prospecting at scale, not variant generation

Generating 200 variants of the same 10 concepts adds near-zero value — the 190th variant is not meaningfully different from the first. The leverage is in concepting: finding angles that wouldn't emerge from a human brainstorm. AI-powered competitive synthesis (scraping ad libraries, agent interpretation, hypothesis generation) automates what used to require a full-time analyst.