ANIL
RALPH
THOMAS

There was a time when a 30-second ad could make you feel something. Specifically. A tightening in the chest. A quiet recognition.

We called them TVCs. They were, in truth, compressed cinema.

Something changed.

Today's ads are technically extraordinary. Cinematography: immaculate. Edits: kinetic. Celebrities: expensive. And yet, most of it evaporates the moment the screen goes dark.

The craft of making ads has never been more refined. The craft of telling stories within them has quietly collapsed.

This matters more than it sounds.

People don't buy products. They buy better versions of themselves, from brands that help them believe that version is possible. Narrative is the oldest technology we have for building belief, trust, and memory.

Research bears this out: story-driven work consistently outperforms feature-led and celebrity-led advertising on recall, emotional engagement, and loyalty.

So why have we stopped doing it?

A few uncomfortable possibilities.

Commoditization killed the brief. When a product is indistinguishable from competitors, the temptation is to retreat into aesthetics. The montage becomes a smoke screen.

Research learned to punish risk. Pre-testing tools minimize downside. But authentic storytelling is polarizing, it moves some people deeply. So we optimize for the safe middle: ads that no one loves, no one hates, and no one remembers.

Craft atrophied from disuse. Writing a real narrative is hard. When the industry normalizes the quick win, that muscle weakens. Eventually, people stop knowing it's missing.

And then AI arrived. Promising liberation. Delivering more of the same, faster.

The problem was never production cost. It was, and remains, the willingness to believe that a story, told well, is worth more than a surface rendered beautifully.

So whose story is filling those 30 seconds, if not the brand's, told through the consumer's truth?

Right now, in too many cases: no one's.

The reel ends. The feeling doesn't arrive. The brand is forgotten before the next scroll.

Reclaiming the narrative isn't nostalgia. It's competitive advantage hiding in plain sight. The audience is still wired for this. Still waiting.

The question is whether the people making ads still believe it's worth the effort.

Generative AI has delivered the greatest democratisation of craft in history. Anyone can now execute at a professional baseline. The blank page has lost its tyranny. Iteration cycles have compressed. Small teams, even solo creators, can punch far above their weight.

That power is real. And genuinely transformative.

But the same tool carries a quieter risk. It trains us to settle for good enough. And the best creative work has never been built on good enough.

The deeper danger isn't that AI lacks creativity. It's that it makes mediocrity frictionless.

Every brief becomes a prompt. Every solution becomes a remix. We outsource the struggle, and the struggle is precisely where original thinking lives. The strange connections. The uncomfortable ideas. The work that makes an audience feel something they didn't expect to feel.

AI excels at pattern recognition. The strongest creative work breaks patterns. It zigs when the data says zag.

What it still cannot do

The limitations become clearest in sustained creation. AI generates brilliant moments, a striking scene, a sharp line, a compelling visual. But it struggles with continuity. Emotional states reset without warning. Character motivations drift. Subtext evaporates unless you constantly re-prompt, recalibrate, babysit the output.

In longer formats, narrative memory degrades. You end up manually stitching coherence back together, defeating much of the promised efficiency. Multimodal execution reveals wider gaps still: lip-sync feels mechanical, voice lacks authentic grain, performance emotion fails to track an evolving arc.

The result can test well and land emotionally vacant. Technically flawless. Humanly hollow.

At its core, AI cannot originate intent. It reacts. It optimises. It remixes existing data. The instinctive leaps, the productive contradictions, the lived emotional logic that makes a story truly land, all still originate outside the machine.

The realistic path forward

The healthiest relationship is hybrid. Treat AI as a powerful production layer. Never as the creative spine.

The winners won't be the ones who use AI most. They'll be the ones who architect the vision, preserving human instinct, contradiction, and the courage to break patterns, while letting AI handle the scaffolding and heavy lifting.

Generative AI is neither saviour nor villain. It is a chisel: extraordinarily sharp in skilled hands, capable of amplifying craft at scale, yet equally capable of producing polished but soulless work when wielded without judgment.

The edge that matters most is still the one held by the human who knows exactly when to cut with it, and when to set it down.

The principle is sound. If an agency's work drives business results, it should share in those results. Skin in the game. Accountability baked in.

But before a client reaches for the outcome-based model, there's a prior question that almost never gets asked honestly: has the client done their part?

The 4 P's problem

Advertising doesn't operate in a vacuum. It operates inside a business. And a business has four levers, Product, Price, Place, Promotion, only one of which the agency controls.

Is the product genuinely superior, or is it parity in a crowded category? Is the pricing competitive, or does it command a premium that the market hasn't been persuaded to accept yet? Is distribution optimal, the right markets, the right channels, the right shelf presence? Has the promotion been funded and executed at least at threshold levels, to the right audiences?

If the answer to any of these is no, the agency is being asked to perform surgery with a blunt instrument, and then held responsible for the patient's recovery.

Outcome-based models that ignore the 4 P's aren't accountability. They're a convenient way to leave the agency holding the can.

The other uncomfortable question

Is the client actually open to the agency's ideas?

Because there's a pattern that repeats. The client pushes for outcome-based fees, signalling confidence in measurable results. Then proceeds to override the brief, dilute the idea, insist on their own direction, and approve the safe version. The agency executes. The work underperforms. The agency absorbs the financial consequence of a decision it wasn't allowed to make.

Outcome-based remuneration requires something most client-agency relationships don't have enough of: genuine creative trust. If a client is going to judge the agency on results, the agency must have real latitude to pursue the work it believes will deliver those results.

You can't tie someone's hands and then penalise them for not swimming.

How outcome is qualified matters enormously

Short-term sales blips and long-term brand equity are not the same thing, and conflating them punishes exactly the work that builds durable businesses. The campaign that moves product this quarter and the campaign that shifts brand perception over three years require different briefs, different timelines, and different yardsticks.

If outcome is measured only in immediate commercial response, agencies will stop taking the risks that build brands. And clients will wonder, five years later, why their brand has no equity left.

The way forward

A hybrid model is the right answer. But hybrid only works if both sides come to the table with transparency and genuine commitment.

Clients must be honest about what they're inputting, the product, the pricing, the distribution, the creative latitude they're actually willing to grant. Agencies must be honest about what they can realistically influence and over what timeline.

The parameters of success need to be agreed before the work begins, not invented retroactively to suit whoever came out ahead.

In the end, outcome-based remuneration isn't a financial model. It's a test of the relationship. The agencies and clients who can have this conversation honestly will produce better work and better business results. Those who can't will spend a lot of time arguing about whose fault it was.