[SINGAPORE] Artificial intelligence (AI) is sweeping across the advertising and marketing industry – and challenging the traditional agency model where too much time and manpower are spent producing commercials or advertising campaigns.
AI has compressed the time needed for visualisation and copywriting, and some ads are now even completely produced by it.
“The agency has to move from a time-based model to an output-based model,” Martin Sorrell, executive Chairman of S4 Capital, told The Business Times.
S4 Capital’s agency, Monks, has created a number of ads using agentic AI – autonomous systems that are designed to make decisions and act with minimal human intervention. The quality of these AI-produced ads, some with zero human interaction, has scaled up in the last eight months.
The time taken has also reduced. It typically took around 200 days to produce and film an ad for a major client. This has now dropped to just 12 days.
AI is also driving personalisation for ads and marketing, combining first-party data from clients with data from platforms such as Google, to cater directly to each individual consumer. This also scales up the number of assets needed dramatically, said Sorrell.
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Media buying and planning – an industry largely still stuck on manual tools and spreadsheets – is also set to be disrupted by AI.
Automating some of these functions and buying media based on an algorithm will affect the number of people in the industry.
“I think that will result in fewer employment opportunities, and there certainly won’t be 250,000 people (globally) doing media planning,” he said.
Sorrell is known for growing WPP into an advertising and marketing giant from a shell company, and has found it easier to adapt S4 Capital to the evolving tech trends. Building its roots in digital and data has made Monks faster, better and cheaper than competitors.
AI, however, is not creating any top-line pressure for S4 Capital, even as it seems to the man on the street that AI can do creative work. Instead, geopolitical challenges are what is putting pressure on its revenue.
The latest financial results for S4 Capital showed revenue for the first quarter of 2025 fell 12.2 per cent to £163.7 million (S$283.4 million), from £186.4 million in Q1 2024. But billings rose 7.7 per cent on the year to £463.3 million from £430.1 million.
Deglobalisation is also leading to challenges in dealing across borders, and Sorrell notes that picking a geography is now even more important. Asia is still seen as a growth region for S4 Capital, but there are still inherent risks operating here.
“In Asia, there’s the Taiwan risk, so if you’re big in China, meaning more than 15 to 20 per cent of your sales is in China, you probably don’t want to take more risks,” he said.
Once tariffs are sorted, the pressure to grow the top line will intensify. That’s where AI can help, raising efficiencies in a world where growth is slowing.
S4 Capital is also shifting along with macroeconomic forces, as Sorrell looks to capture more business from Asia. Currently, the business is concentrated in the Americas, making up about 79 per cent of revenue in 2024, with Europe, the Middle East and Africa (Emea) accounting for 16 per cent and Asia-Pacific for 6 per cent.
A good target for Sorrell is to see 60 per cent of revenue come from the Americas, and 20 per cent each from Emea and Asia.
Monks has offices across Asia-Pacific, including in Singapore, Australia, India and Indonesia. There is a need to grow even more rapidly here in the region, said Sorrell.
The work, too, is changing. Rather than just executing global contracts in Asia-Pacific, Monks is seeing more outbound work from South Korea and China to other parts of the world. Given trade tariffs in the US, companies in China have shifted their focus to other geographies.
Sorrell noted that China is becoming one of the biggest trading partners in Latin America. Coupled with the US tariffs, it is likely Chinese brands will seek markets outside of the US to make up the shortfall, making outbound work from Asia more important.
“We’ve seen it in June this year, China is altering towards the Brics, the next 11 of the Global South,” he said.
