NEWS YOU CAN’T MISS

AI Is Taking Over Advertising—Are Marketers Ready?

AI is rapidly transforming the advertising industry, bringing both opportunities and challenges that are reshaping its landscape.

Generative AI tools such as OpenAI’s DALL·E, Google’s Veo, and Midjourney now enable content creation at unprecedented speed and scale, prompting agencies to rethink their strategies.

Mark Read, outgoing CEO of WPP—one of the world’s largest advertising firms—describes AI’s impact as “totally disrupting our business,” predicting it will “completely revolutionize” advertising.

• Here’s why: He said AI now makes powerful tools and knowledge available to everyone, not just big companies or experts, and allows advanced creative and marketing tasks to be handled by machines.

• How did WPP deal with this: The company is embedding AI deeply into its operations, with 50,000 employees using its proprietary AI platform, WPP Open.

• AI is now involved in everything from drafting briefs and planning media strategies to optimizing campaign performance.

Read is not the only one witnessing this revolution in marketing and advertising. A Forrester report notes that over 60% of US advertising agencies are already using generative AI, with another 31% actively exploring its potential.

If you’re in this sector, you must upskill yourself to lead teams that know how to work with and manage risk with AI.

Is ChatGPT Making Us All Think the Same Way?

A new study published in Nature Human Behaviour found that while ChatGPT can crank out ideas faster than any human, there’s a catch: most of those ideas end up sounding the same.

Researchers asked participants to come up with a toy concept using just two things—a brick and a fan. Those who used ChatGPT generated ideas quickly, but 94% of them overlapped. Some even landed on the exact same name: “Build-a-Breeze Castle”.

In contrast, humans working on their own (or with a little help from web searches) produced a much broader mix of unique ideas. The study’s takeaway? People bring variety, randomness, and unexpected connections that AI still struggles to replicate.

So while ChatGPT is great for jumpstarting a creative session, if you're aiming for something truly original, you may still want to bring your own weird brain to the table. What do you think?

Meet Blaise Metreweli, the first woman to lead MI6

Celebrating this week’s Woman in Tech 🥳: Meet Blaise Metreweli, the first woman to lead Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) in its 116-year history—bringing tech experience to the highest level of UK intelligence.

Metreweli spent part of her childhood in Hong Kong and studied anthropology at Pembroke College, Cambridge. She joined MI6 as a case officer in 1999 and has spent much of her 25-year career in operational roles for them across Europe and the Middle East. Metreweli has also held senior positions at MI5 and is fluent in Arabic.

Since 2021, she has served as Director General for Technology and Innovation at MI6, where she leads the agency’s strategy on cybersecurity, surveillance countermeasures, and emerging technologies. Her work has focused on modernizing digital tradecraft, developing AI-enabled tools, and building partnerships across the intelligence community. She is widely regarded as one of MI6’s leading voices on tech and innovation.

Metreweli takes on her new role in autumn 2025. Her appointment marks a historic milestone, and reflects the growing importance of tech in the future of intelligence. Best wishes to Metreweli for her awesome new role!

ps. She taught herself encryption as a kid and has called herself “a geek who always wanted to be a spy.” 🤓