Singularity of Creative and Media. Brand Marketers’ AI Strategic Blueprint:

Excerpted from The Myers Report 75-page 2025/2026 Advertising Economic Analysis, Media Financial Forecast, and Upfront/Newfront Overview.

The Fusion of Media and Creative Strategy

The most immediate and visible impact of generative AI in advertising lies in creative redundancy reduction. Historically, creative teams have been tasked with producing endless variations of assets for different platforms—shorter cutdowns for Instagram, banner resizing for programmatic display, vertical formats for TikTok, audio remixing for Spotify, email banners, and more.

But this is only the beginning.

What lies ahead is a reintegration of creative and media disciplines, reversing decades of operational separation between "what we say" and "where we say it."

In traditional advertising structures, media planners and creative teams operate in parallel but siloed ecosystems. A media team might identify high-impact placements or audiences, only for creative to develop assets in isolation often with little dynamic interaction between messaging and medium.

Generative AI fundamentally disrupts this model by enabling synchronous development of media and creative. AI can now identify not just where audiences are most likely to be influenced, but also what kind of creative expressions -- tone, style, pacing, cultural references -- will maximize engagement and outcomes within each specific channel.

In real-time, AI systems can simulate:

• Creative variants that perform best across specific publisher environments

• Influencer collaborations most aligned with target audience values

• Cultural sentiment and topical relevance by geography, time, or demographic

• Emotional resonance testing across tone and message permutations

This convergence heralds a return to cohesive storytelling across the funnel. The ad creative, placement, and timing are no longer independently optimized; they are conceived together, guided by machine intelligence and human intuition.

Creators, Influencers, and AI-Defined Identity

One of the most consequential implications of this fusion is in influencer marketing—arguably the most human expression of brand storytelling today. Influencers are often chosen based on follower counts, audience demos, or brand affinity. But increasingly, AI can process layers of microdata—including tone of voice, historical engagement by theme, psychological profiling of followers, and semantic alignment between product values and influencer ethos.

AI doesn’t just select influencers; it designs influencer programs—at scale. In some cases, AI will even create influencer personas, powered by avatars, virtual humans, or content clones derived from real creators. These synthetic influencers may be hyper-specialized in narrow niches, culturally relevant in specific subcultures, and algorithmically optimized for performance.

Already, we’ve seen examples like:

• Lil Miquela, a virtual influencer with over 2 million Instagram followers

• Synthesia.io, which allows brands to create AI avatars to front videos in any language or persona

• MetaHuman Creator, enabling photorealistic digital humans for interactive experiences

Creative Leadership in the AI Era

This transformation demands new forms of leadership. In my book The Tao of Leadership I assert that in the face of machine intelligence acceleration, human creativity, empathy, intuition, and storytelling must be elevated, not diminished. Generative AI becomes the canvas; the human leader becomes the conductor.

Rather than fragmenting campaigns across departments, organizations must:

• Break down silos between creative, media, performance, and technology

• Build agile teams that work alongside AI as collaborators, not tools

• Invest in “creativity engineers”—professionals who understand narrative and neural networks

AI is no longer the job of IT. It’s the central nervous system of modern marketing. Following for Substack subscribers are six strategic organizational imperatives for brand marketers as they adapt to a future of creative and media advertising singularity in the AI Era.

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SIX STRATEGIC IMPERATIVES FOR BRAND MARKETERS

1. Establish Unified Objectives and KPIs

• Collaborative Goal Setting: Ensure that both creative and media teams are involved in setting campaign objectives, focusing on shared KPIs such as engagement rates, conversion metrics, and brand lift.​

• Integrated Briefs: Develop comprehensive briefs that encompass both creative direction and media strategy, facilitating a cohesive approach from the outset.​