Forget the Ladder. Advertising Just Blew Open the Side Door.
AI is rewriting the entire industry at lightning speed. New roles, new ventures, and more millionaires forming faster than ever. If you teach or study advertising, this moment is yours.
When I started in advertising, everything was done by hand. We cut type, glued boards, and hoped someone in the room would give us a shot. If you were the wrong race, gender, school, or outside the right network, you had to fight to be seen. The doors were heavy and often closed. Sometimes they opened. Sometimes they didn’t.
Now the doors are wide open. Some are being kicked in. AI is remaking the way campaigns are concepted, tested, launched, and iterated. Entry-level roles like junior planner, coordinator, media buyer, and copy assistant are disappearing fast. That is not a prediction. That is already happening in agencies, media firms, and in-house teams around the world. Tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Runway, Midjourney, and Perplexity are taking over those tasks with more speed, less cost, and zero burnout.
At the same time, a new kind of creative is rising. These are not traditional art directors or copywriters. They are operators. They use AI like an extension of themselves. They prompt, ship, test, rebuild, and move again. They are hired more quickly. They deliver more value. And they are impossible to ignore because they do not wait for permission.
Thousands of these people are launching solo shops. Some build micro-tools that solve one problem. Some create branded newsletters. Others use agents and automation to build creative pipelines that used to take a team. They work with Claude, Cursor, ChatGPT, and Bolt to handle research, creative development, and reporting. They use ElevenLabs to voice scripts, Midjourney or Flux to design images, and Runway to animate spots. What used to cost a hundred thousand dollars and ten weeks now costs fifty bucks and a weekend.
This is the small software era. It is the era of one-person agencies. Most stay lean and profitable. A few scale. Many never raise a dollar. They do not ask for validation. They make work and measure the result.
We are experiencing the biggest surge in self-made millionaires in human history. Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, said it best. AI is now creating more millionaires in five years than the internet did in twenty. That includes ad people. It includes students. It includes everyone willing to move faster than the system was designed for.
And what about the big agencies? They are not going away. But they are shedding layers. The bloated middle consists of teams of strategists, coordinators, and producers who existed to manage complexity. That layer is being hollowed out. AI handles the complexity now. What remains is high-stakes creative leadership, client trust, and the ability to orchestrate teams that move at the speed of software. The smartest agencies are becoming platforms, not pyramids. They’ll look more like Hollywood studios: fast-moving pods around big ideas, plugged into AI-driven production engines. The rest will be legacy shells, clinging to retainers that shrink every quarter. The transformation is already underway.
You are not entering a shrinking field. You are entering one that just shed its skin. The surface roles are vanishing. But underneath, there is massive space to lead.
If you still want to tweak briefs or polish comps, go ahead. But if you want to build real brands, ship campaigns, test them in the wild, and build something that lives in people’s lives, this is your time.
Pick a brand. Find a problem. Ship a solution. Document everything. Publish what you learn. Grow your following. Your audience is your leverage. And your process is your proof.
To Students
You do not need a job to do the work. Use Perplexity to research a space. Use Claude to brainstorm strategies. Use ChatGPT to write ten versions of a campaign. Use Midjourney to show the visuals. Use Runway to animate. Use ElevenLabs to voice. Test it. Publish it. Learn from the reaction. Do it again. Keep going.
You can build your own agent swarm. Tools like AgentSwarm or n8n let you chain together workflows. One agent writes, one edits, one adapts tone, one formats for TikTok, one posts, one reports engagement. It is not science fiction. It is already being done.
You can also launch a newsletter or visual brand today. Write with personality. Use smart visuals. Show your thinking. Substack, Ghost, and Beehiiv make it easy. Your work is your calling card.
You can start a tiny studio. Find clients who need fast creative systems. Automate their workflows. Package results. Charge for value, not time.
You can even buy a small business. Plenty of folk are retiring. Their businesses need modern marketing. Wrap them in AI-driven branding, automation, and smart content. Turn them around.
None of this requires credentials. It requires curiosity, taste, speed, and proof.
To Faculty and Industry Leaders
If you are still teaching campaign polishing, process worship, and portfolio layouts, you are setting students up for a world that is gone. Agencies are restructuring or vanishing. Brands are building in-house. The only reason to hire a human now is if they bring something no agent can replicate. That is not a crisis. That is the opening.
Students need to master tools. Not just Photoshop. They need Runway, n8n, Perplexity, AgentOps, and ElevenLabs. They need to build, test, publish, and adapt in public. They need to know what it feels like to ship work at speed.
Teach that. Or stop pretending you are preparing them for anything real.
We are living through a collapse and a reinvention at once. Most of us never had this kind of chance. We had to claw through walls just to get noticed.
This generation does not. But only if they move.
Business Insider – “The $13 billion Omnicom-IPG megamerger reflects a new era as Big Tech and AI upend the ad industry”
Covers the Omnicom‑IPG merger, its $750M expected cost synergies, and how AI-driven workflows will reduce junior roles and reshape agency structures BBC Partners+5Adweek+5MM+M - Medical Marketing and Media+5Campaign Live+9Business Insider+9The Wall Street Journal+9The Times+2Business Insider+2MM+M - Medical Marketing and Media+2Financial Times – “Omnicom aims for a Mad Men comeback with $13bn Interpublic deal”
Highlights how the merger reflects pressure from technology and AI, and the likelihood of job cuts and consolidation in traditional agency roles Business Insider+5Financial Times+5The Times+5AdWeek – “As Ad Industry Sheds Jobs, These Agencies Are Growing—and Hiring”
Reports on widespread job losses within holding company agencies and notes the shrinking pipeline for junior talent The Times+8Adweek+8Adweek+8AdweekBBC Talking Business – “Can the global advertising industry survive AI?” (YouTube episode)
Explores whether traditional agencies can withstand AI disruption and the shift toward tech-enabled advertising models The Times+2YouTube+2BBC Partners+2Business Insider