Search Is Falling. Agencies Are Scrambling. AI’s Already Moved On.

The advertising industry is being gutted.

What we’re seeing isn’t just another wave of disruption. We're seeing the future and it's fucking fantastic.

This is foundational. In the past few months alone, Amazon, Google, Meta, TikTok and Reddit have all released generative content tools designed to help eCommerce merchants create ads with minimal effort and zero creative teams. These aren’t gimmicks. These are functioning production tools capable of turning a product brief into a full creative campaign in less time than it takes to book a pitch meeting.

Amazon’s version auto-generates product listings and lifestyle imagery. Google folds gen-AI into Performance Max campaigns. Meta lets you churn out headlines, imagery, and ad variations inside Ads Manager, automatically adjusting for placements and audiences. TikTok now gives you a built-in scriptwriter that pulls from trending content. Even Reddit has joined in, offering gen-AI tools to help brands write copy that matches the tone of specific subreddits.

It’s not just the creative work that’s changing. It’s who owns it.

Bye-bye pitch decks, hello prompt boxes

For the first time, brands are turning away from traditional agencies, even for high-stakes events like the Super Bowl or NBA Finals. The old formula of hiring a top agency six months out and spending millions on a flagship spot is no longer the default. Marketers can now generate, iterate, and test multiple campaigns in-house, sometimes using free tools. The quality might not win a Cannes Lion, but it doesn’t need to. It needs to convert.

The best creative isn’t the prettiest. It’s the one that works.

This is where testability becomes key.

The ability to generate ten, twenty, or even a hundred variants of a single ad, each tweaked for a different audience or placement, isn’t just a novelty. It’s a strategy. The modern marketing cycle relies on speed, not polish. The best creative isn’t the one that gets the most applause in a boardroom. It’s the one that performs. And you only find it by testing, relentlessly.

Testability has shifted creative from a slow, linear process to something more like live theatre. You launch wide, measure quickly, and adapt in real time. No second-guessing, no overthinking, no waiting for sign-off from six layers of agency hierarchy. Just results, or the lack of them. That’s why generative tools are gaining ground. Not because they’re perfect, but because they’re fast, cheap, and good enough to outperform a mediocre human brief on a bad day.

Turns out people don’t want search results. They want answers.

At the same time, we’re seeing something else: the first real decline in year-on-year search volumes. Consumers are leaving traditional search engines and heading straight to answer engines like Perplexity, or asking chatbots like ChatGPT. Instead of trawling through pages of links, they want direct answers, right now, in the flow of whatever else they’re doing.

This shift has consequences. If people aren’t searching, they’re not seeing ads in the same way. The whole paid search model starts to wobble when discovery is driven by conversation rather than keywords. Brands will have to rethink how they show up, and where.

You can’t pivot to relevance once you’ve been replaced

So what happens next?

Some agencies will pivot. They’ll lean into strategy, storytelling, or post-production refinement. Others will double down on performance, positioning themselves as AI-native shops. But many won’t make it. The work they used to own is being automated, distributed, and democratised. It’s not going to come back.

What’s emerging instead is a new kind of creative process. One that’s messier, faster, and less precious. One that values performance over perfection. And one that puts powerful tools in the hands of people who don’t have "Creative Director" in their job title.

Like it or not, that’s the new baseline.