Wesley ter Haar, co-founder of Monks, walked the floor at Ai4 in Las Vegas and found hundreds of vendors pitching variations on the same prompt engines, context layers and tenfold workflow claims. When every company can buy the same off-the-shelf speed, he wrote, technology stops being a moat. The battleground he names instead is internal: process friction, approval paralysis and retainer structures.
The economics are the root of it. The industry sells time, and a team that uses AI to execute a campaign in days rather than weeks bills less for the same work — the agency is penalized for its own efficiency. Budgets shrink under procurement scrutiny, senior talent gets stretched across a dozen accounts, and execution cascades down to a siloed workforce.
He has a word for the internal blocker: “exciety,” a mix of excitement about generative tools and anxiety about one’s own relevance. An all-staff email declaring the company AI-first does nothing about it. His alternative is a mandatory 15-minute weekly huddle in which a junior art director shows the floor how a custom script turns a dense strategy deck into a 12-panel storyboard.
These practices led to products like an AI-driven performance engine built for Google Chrome: 16 markets, more than 10 languages, turnaround cut from 30 business days to 10, production costs down by more than 25%, creative variants refreshed every fortnight. Algorithms such as Meta Advantage+ reward volume and visual diversity over strict brand consistency, and want more than 80 distinct assets to optimize reach. Left to run on their own, ter Haar wrote, generative models default to the statistical middle: safe, consensus-driven tropes and generic lifestyle photography.
Read more at Ad Age.