2 of 3: Yesterday was part one.
The advertising industry is having the wrong argument about AI.
On one side, the advertising old guard warns that machine-generated content will flood the market with cheap, soulless work that degrades the craft. On the other, CFOs and holding company executives see a cost-efficiency revolution and want to know when the headcount reduction begins. Both sides are treating AI as a production tool. A faster, cheaper way to make the same thing they were already making.
Neither side is asking the more interesting question.
If the cost of making content approaches zero, what should we make? And more precisely: for whom?
I wrote recently about what a commercial break actually is. Not in the polite language of media buying, but in the honest language of human experience. It is someone walking up to a spellbinding campfire mid-story and interrupting it with something unrelated. Or worse, trying to out-entertain the story that the audience was already inhabiting. This interruption violates the neurological state that makes storytelling work. It extracts attention from the audience and converts it into revenue for someone else.
That model is not dying because AI arrived. It was already in its death throes. Ad blockers. Skip buttons. Subscription tiers. The audience has been voting with its attention for two decades. AI just makes the ad industry’s next move more urgent.
If, as creators, we no longer have production constraints, the excuse for irrelevance disappears.
Here is the question I’d like to raise instead: If commercials still have to exist, and for now they do, we need to stop asking “how do we interrupt well?” and start asking “how do we stop interrupting entirely?” I believe the answer is found not by removing ads from the equation, but by changing what an ad is allowed to be.
Think about what it means to watch something you are genuinely inside. A show about vampires. Not a procedural, not background television, but the kind of world-built storytelling that transports you. You are in that world. Its rules feel real. Its textures feel inhabited. You have relocated, in the neurological sense, to somewhere specific.
Now a brand appears.
In the current model, what happens is a hard cut. You are pulled out of the vampire world and placed inside a thirty-second story about a truck, or a pharmaceutical, or a fast food item. The truck story has its own visual grammar, its own emotional register, its own agenda. It is not in conversation with where you were. It is competing with it or simply indifferent to it.
What if instead the brand asked a different question?
What does this story-world need? What would feel like a gift to the audience rather than a toll?
I’m not talking about product placement. Product placement is a brand logo sitting in the frame of someone else’s story, hoping proximity does the work. What I am describing is something more intentional. A brand that studies the world it is entering and asks: what can we contribute to this experience? What can we add that the audience would actually want to receive?
If we can make almost anything for almost nothing, that question becomes answerable in ways it never was before.
A brand inside a vampire narrative is not stuck running its standard creative. It can make something that lives in that world. Something that extends the mythology rather than interrupts it. Something that the audience experiences not as an extraction but as an addition. A piece of the world they didn’t have before.
That is a different creative brief. It requires a different relationship between the brand and the story.
The industry term that gets closest to this is contextual advertising, but the current version of that idea is too thin. Contextual today means matching keywords, or placing a hotel ad near travel content, or a running shoe ad near a fitness segment. That is congruence at the category level. What I am envisioning is congruence at the world level. Not just does this ad relate to this content? But does this ad belong in this story? Does it understand the rules of this place? Does it add something that a person who loves this world would actually want to learn about, participate in, or buy?
The brands that have ever done anything close to this did it expensively and rarely. For a stretch, Red Bull pushed beyond sponsoring extreme sports to building the world those sports lived in. They made media, they created characters, they developed mythologies. The product was almost secondary to the story. The people who sought out Red Bull content weren’t interested in an energy drink. They sought that content because Red Bull had become fluent in a world they cared about.
That fluency used to require enormous resources and long time horizons. What changes now is that the barrier to fluency drops dramatically. A brand that can generate contextually appropriate content, calibrated to the specific world a viewer inhabits, at the moment they are inside it, is no longer making ads in the traditional sense. It is making contributions.
That is a different kind of value, and a different kind of relationship.
The audience knows the difference between a brand that understands their world and a brand that wandered into it with a thirty-second spot built for a different context entirely. One feels like a stranger interrupting. The other feels, at its best, like the story got a little bigger.
Currently, the industry argument about AI focuses on what it costs and what it threatens. Those are legitimate concerns. But the more urgent argument is about what it makes possible.
For the first time in the history of commercial storytelling, a brand can afford to ask not just how do I reach this audience, but what does this audience’s narrative world actually need from me?
That question is harder than making cheaper ads. It requires the brand to be genuinely curious about the story it is entering. To understand the rules of the world. To make something that adds rather than extracts. A situation where agencies and creative directors still hold massive relevance.
But it is the only question, in a world where interruption is optional, that leads anywhere worth going.
The campfire was always generous. The storyteller gave something. The audience received it and gave back their full attention. That exchange was never extraction. It was participation.
The brands that figure out how to belong inside that exchange, rather than interrupting it, will not just be more effective. They will be welcomed.
That is a different business entirely.
Tomorrow: what it means for a brand to belong to a world rather than just advertise near it.