In the second edition of our new series How AI Will Change, we zoom out from the minutiae of the industry to how advertising is actually experienced. We’re already seeing massive shifts play out in the world of search with the shift towards AI summaries. The contest isn’t for the first click but the second, if there is any click at all. AI also has the potential to completely upend media consumption, maybe affording us the opportunity to look up from our tiny pocket computers. It will force brands to confront a basic question: what, exactly, is the value of our presence in someone’s day?
We explore these existential shifts with Ajinkya “Jinx” Joglekar—former SVP & Head of Marketing at Sling TV/Dish, founder of strategic advisory firm Growth Stack Commerce, and host of The Art of Commerce podcast. With a career spanning telco, streaming, DTC, and SaaS, Joglekar is known for brand storytelling, building high-performing teams, and turning marketing into a measurable engine for business growth.
The current ad experience really is one of disruption. There's so many mediums with which to communicate with a customer, whether it be CTV, mobile, digital out-of-home, and our job is to interrupt that experience in a compelling way. If your first click is the AI summary, you’re not getting an ad in that answer and you’re not clicking to a site first, the way we “compellingly disrupt” has to change. In my view, not dominating that first click, because the first click's going to be the AI summary. It's actually the second click. For example, how do you become the source of truth in that answer? Just as we learned to optimize for organic search under Google, we’ll need to figure out AI-generated answer optimization too. Ads will show up around those experiences eventually, but we still have to plan for a world where the answer itself is ad-light or ad-free.
I agree paid search will diminish, but consumer behavior is hard to change at scale, so it won’t go from 100 to zero. In the next year, companies like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini will monetize by figuring out new ad units. Twenty years ago, when Google released paid search, the C-suite wasn’t paying attention. This time, boards are already fluent in AI and will immediately ask, “What’s our plan?”
On the creative side, AI collapses production costs. If I used to spend $300K on a TV ad, now I might spend a fraction of that. That frees budget for better media or many more creative variations for personalization. Channels like CTV, historically less targeted because of expensive production, will benefit as AI makes dynamic, personalized creative far more practical.
If the first click is the AI answer, your job is to earn the second click to your owned experience. Become the source of truth that an answer credibly links to, tangible things like price comparisons, calculators, virtual tours, so when users want to go deeper, the best next step is your site.
Think of Progressive’s rate comparison tools. Even when they weren’t the cheapest, the transparency built trust and made them a destination. That’s the mindset for AI: create something so useful that the answer recommends your experience as the next step.
Exactly. For commerce, I keep thinking about Nike-style customization. You can’t do that inside the chat box today. So capitalize on the white space we have now by building experiences the AI can point to as the best place to complete the task.
The term agentic took some time for me to understand and strip away the jargon, but I’ve come to the understanding that agents are essentially subject-matter experts. In the Nike example, it would be merchandising, fulfillment, finance SMEs (subject matter experts), coordinated by an orchestrating agent. In real companies, those SMEs don’t always collaborate in real time. Agents can.
Applied to commerce, it means a shopper deciding on a shoe sees what’s available, delivery timing, and cost as they make a decision. The merchandiser, supply chain, and fulfillment “talk” instantly. Done right, that’s a digital Nordstrom associate who’s transparent, coordinated, and helpful.
It’s the future, to the point that I’m building an AI creative studio with my business partners. People obsess over prompts, but prompts are just like being on set. You still need a tight brief, a real story, storyboards, and taste. AI democratizes production, but the choices about timing, tone, and tools are human. For example, AI wouldn’t be able to reason that the NBA finals are a good time to launch an ad like this because June is such a quiet time in sports.
So as human marketers, we should be focused on the creative brief, the storyboard, and other things that require taste and cultural context. Couple that with AI production, and it democratizes creative development and helps challenger brands punch above their weight.
I call this my nirvana, but I know why it’s hard. Today’s “dynamic creative” is basically rotating pre-made assets. My nirvana has no static assets. Feed the system your brand guidelines, historical performance, and constraints. Let it assemble the best headline, image, and offer for this individual in real time—and carry that thread into the site experience and even audience targeting. We can’t create a million assets or run a million A/B tests today, but even getting 1–10% of the way meaningfully reduces creative load and improves engagement and revenue.
I do. The landscape of advertising is fragmented and only going to get more so with new social and platforms, and ways of consuming content coming into the fold. The rise of AI creative will make eye-catching, thumb stopping moments more available and cost effective for advertisers. As marketers, we need to remember our fundamentals about storytelling and appealing to customer needs over gimmicks to earn the right to disrupt someone’s focus and get them to pay attention to our brands.
