EXCLUSIVE Agency Scope 2025 | The AI conundrum: Efficiency vs creativity
The Agency Scope 2025 Survey shows an industry racing into AI while dreading the fallout. For 76.9% of marketers and agencies—almost double 2023’s figure—adapting to AI is the top challenge. The promise is efficiency. The risk is creative convergence, where every campaign starts to look, feel and sound the same.
The Agency Scope 2025 Survey shows an industry racing into AI while dreading the fallout (Image source: © 123rf 123rf)
Marketers fear losing the distinctiveness that gives their brands an edge. Agencies fear a deeper threat: their creative value evaporating when clients can generate “good enough” work at the click of a button.
How to avoid joining the herd
“AI isn’t optional,” says César Vacchiano, president and CEO of Scopen.
“But if it’s used without intent, it homogenises creativity. The real question isn’t whether to use AI—it’s how to avoid joining the herd.”
CFOs push for cost cuts and automation. Marketing teams wrestle with interchangeable output. When everyone draws from the same algorithmic well, standing out stops being a creative ambition and becomes a survival strategy.
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3 key findings
- Budgets that multiply by dividing
Here's the contradiction keeping South African marketers awake at night: advertising spend has risen over the past two years, yet budgets feel tighter than ever. Fragmentation is the culprit.
Money that once powered a handful of campaigns is now sliced across platforms, touchpoints and specialist partners.
Nearly 30% of marketers cite shrinking budgets and economic pressure as a top challenge, up sharply from 11.8% in 2023.
Agencies face the same brutal maths: deliver more innovation, prove ROI, compete with in-house teams and consultancies—while resources stretch ever thinner.
- The cost of complacency
Perhaps the most unsettling finding isn't about AI's limitations, but our own.
Marketers worry that easy access to generated content will dull creative ambition and reward adequacy over disruption. When the tool does the heavy lifting, creative muscle atrophies.
Understanding consumers is also getting harder. Cited by 12% as a key challenge, consumer insight is increasingly elusive in fragmented, multi-screen environments that render traditional journey mapping obsolete.
Authentic connection becomes harder still when algorithms mediate every interaction.
- When partnership becomes strategy
The growing importance of partnership and empathy—up from 1.4% to 6.7%— signals a quiet shift. As AI absorbs execution, human relationships become the differentiator.
The most-desired partners tell the story: Google, Meta and Kantar lead not for creativity, but for control of data, platforms and insight.
OpenAI's appearance on the list confirms what’s already clear. AI platforms are no longer tools. They are strategic partners.
The human firewall
The path forward requires uncomfortable honesty. AI will transform planning, creative development, media buying and measurement. Resisting is futile. But surrendering to it guarantees mediocrity.
“The Agency Scope 2025 data points to a shared truth,” says Johanna McDowell, CEO of the Independent Agency Search & Selection Company and Scopen’s South African partner.
“Those who thrive in 2026 will treat AI as an accelerant for human creativity, not a replacement. Marketers will need to push harder for original thinking, while agencies will need to prove their value beyond what algorithms can generate.”
The research makes one thing clear: the real challenge isn't adapting to AI.
It's doing so without becoming interchangeable, predictable and forgettable. In a world where every brand has access to the same tools, the only sustainable advantage is the one machines can't replicate—genuinely original human thinking.