As AI’s grip on the marketing discipline tightens, a new tension appears to be emerging. On one hand, brands are embracing automation and generative tools to unlock improved efficiencies, while on the other, there’s a growing unease about creativity, control and the very identity of what marketers do.
As the judging day for The Drum Awards for Marketing (EMEA) kicked off, a panel of marketers from Britvic, Sage and Primark discussed how artificial intelligence is reshaping not only creative execution, but also the internal perception of marketing’s role in the business.
What emerged was a portrait of a discipline on the brink of transformation – if it can resist the temptation to treat AI as a shortcut and instead embed it as part of a broader strategic shift. Former Britvic and Heineken CMO Cindy Tervoort highlighted that marketing is no longer operating in a silo and marketers need to forge strategic partnerships with CTOs and other internal functions to define AI’s role within a company’s transformation agenda.
“I think that the speed with which AI comes in and challenges all of the thinking and the trajectory on how we built the organization, it makes you think, what is the organization of the future?” she said. “We need to work now with the other people in the C-suite to have a holistic plan on what the company stands for, what the strategy is and how marketing fits into that. Marketing becomes more and more a transformation or change catalyst, but it’s complex.”
This growing complexity is forcing marketers to confront long-standing internal challenges, especially around how they’re perceived by their finance departments. At Sage, Harry Davies, vice-president of marketing strategy, effectiveness and investment, shared the tension between brand investment and budget cycles built for shorter-term accountability.
“We relaunched our brand about three years ago and our finance team gave us some extra money in order to do that. We put in for another transformation budget and the response was, ‘But you’ve done brand now, so we’re taking that away.’ I guess we need them to recognize that we need to be consistent with our brand over a longer period of time.”
In an era when CFOs look for quarterly performance, AI is adding a new layer of both promise and pressure. The promise lies in efficiency; the pressure lies in the fear of losing control over the creative process.
“A lot of the creative agencies are coming to us, going, ‘Hey, look, we can speed up your production by doing X, Y and Z,’ which is really welcome and quite exciting,” Davies explained. “But we’re seeing a lot of creative agencies probably getting scared of marketers that are going to just start typing prompts into Firefly and generating ads. And they’re going to be rubbish, but they’re not going to care, because they’re just going to push them out anyway.”
Davies speaks to a growing concern in the industry that generative tools will be misused – not because marketers don’t care about quality, but because the internal demand for speed and output will override craftsmanship.
“I think they [agencies] are trying to get involved in it. And I think that’s quite interesting – where you get the sort of good ideas mixed with the technology. You could speed things up and reduce costs. I think that’s quite exciting.”
But speed and cost-efficiency are only part of the equation. For marketers such as Wendy Duggan, director of marketing at Primark, AI is forcing a more existential conversation around brand values and how they scale in a tech-driven world. Duggan acknowledged that while the company is still early in its AI journey, it’s beginning to engage with the broader implications of how artificial intelligence intersects with brand values, especially in a fashion context where nuance and inclusivity are critical. “It’s a difficult fashion subject,” she said. “Our values are centred around inclusivity in terms of what we do in the basic brands and AI.” Duggan’s comments reflect a cautious but considered approach, where the adoption of AI is being evaluated not just for efficiency, but for how it aligns with Primark’s cultural and ethical commitments.
In short: not everything can – or should – be automated. The emotional and cultural nuance required to maintain brand integrity, particularly in fashion and lifestyle sectors, presents limitations that AI hasn’t yet solved. This raises a bigger question. If AI is set to absorb many of the tactical functions of marketing, what then becomes the strategic role of marketers themselves?
For Tervoort, the answer is clear – it’s about redefining the department as a strategic linchpin, not a cost line. “More than ever, we are often in the middle of sustainability, of technology, marketing, sales, but it’s important to be in a worthwhile seat,” she said. “It’s up to us to rewrite that narrative.”
Davies echoed the need for a new approach to internal storytelling. “Getting rid of the superlatives is something I would advise,” he said, reflecting on how marketers present work to CEOs and boards. “Ultimately, most of the advertising and marketing that organizations do is pretty average and, being more honest about that, you then can unlock better conversations.”
So, where does that leave the next generation of marketers? All three panelists agreed they’d choose marketing again today as a career, but with eyes open to the new expectations: critical thinking, fluency in data and technology and, above all, a deep understanding of customer decision-making.
“Marketing is the way of understanding people’s decision making and then influencing that decision making,” said Davies. “That’s a really amazing thing.”
As the tools evolve and job descriptions shift, perhaps the mission remains the same: understanding people and connecting with them in meaningful ways. Whether that’s done by human insight or machine assistance, the most successful brands will be those that remember marketing isn’t just a function – it’s a force for change.
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