From AI Output to Accountable Growth: Five Key Takeaways from ADVANCE
For the past few years, marketing conversations have been dominated by one question: How should I use AI?
At ADVANCE 2026, that question started to feel a little incomplete, and the shift is already well underway. According to the Smartly ADVANCE Thought Leadership Study 2026, conducted by Alter Agents among 500 marketers, 99% of marketers are already using AI in advertising. The question is no longer whether AI belongs in the marketing workflow. It is what marketers choose to do with it—and what they decide should remain distinctly human.
Hosted at Spring Studios in New York City, ADVANCE 2026 brought together leaders from brands, agencies, and platforms to examine how advertising is changing as AI moves from experimentation to expectation. Across the stage and in the conversations between sessions, one idea kept returning: in an age of infinite output, meaningful connection has become a scarce resource.
The most valuable connections aren’t just between brands and consumers. They’re between creative and media, strategy and execution, data and clarity, AI and human judgment. When those work together, marketing teams can move faster without losing control, quality, or accountability.
Here are the ideas that stood out from ADVANCE 2026.
1. Creative volume isn’t the same as creative intelligence
AI has made it easier to produce more creative, faster. But more variations don’t automatically create more impact. Our research reflects that tension. Four in five marketers believe AI is best suited to enhancing human ideas, while 62% believe it risks flattening creativity. As Smartly CEO Laura Desmond shared in her opening remarks, “AI is used to supercharge human ideas, not replace them.” In other words, marketers are not rejecting AI. They are asking for a better division of labor.
The challenge now is building a system that can connect creative decisions to performance signals, audience context, and brand intent. That was the focus of The Creative Intelligence Advantage, where John Paulson, Managing Director at WPP Production, highlighted the point: “Scale doesn’t mean impact.”
The discussion made a useful distinction: creative shouldn’t be treated as a production output that disappears once an ad launches. It should be part of a continuous learning system—one that helps teams understand what resonates, why it is working, and what to make next.
For marketers, the implication is practical. The goal isn’t to use AI to fill every available placement with new assets. It’s to use intelligence to make creative more relevant, more coherent, and more accountable to the outcome it is meant to drive.
2. The buyer is in control, and marketing has to earn confidence
Modern buyers don’t move through a neat, linear funnel. B2B buyers research independently, compare options across channels, and often form an opinion before they ever speak with a sales team. That makes confidence (not just awareness) the central marketing challenge.
In The Buyer Is in Control: A New Framework for B2B Growth, Amy Hawthorne, Sr. Director of B2B Strategy and Transformation at LinkedIn, emphasized how critical it is to speak to all stakeholders and get in front of them early enough for it to count. Marketers don’t need to create more content for every stage of the journey. Instead, they need to create connected experiences that help each stakeholder understand the problem, trust the solution, and feel ready to act, before they enter the active buying cycle.
That requires alignment between brand, creative, media, and measurement. When those functions operate in isolation, buyers receive fragmented signals. When they work as a connected system, every interaction can build on the last one and move the buyer closer to a decision.
3. AI needs human judgment, governance, and a clear owner
Agents were, unsurprisingly, a hot topic of conversation all day long. But, as AI becomes part of everyday marketing operations, the question is no longer whether teams will use it. The question is how they will use it responsibly and how they will know when a human needs to step in.
The research suggests that marketers are already imagining this shift. Eighty-one percent say AI enables them to bring bigger projects and ideas to life than they could on their own. At the same time, marketers estimate that only around one in four workflows is fully replaceable by AI. AI may take on more of the formulaic work, but people still need to decide what is strategically important, creatively resonant, and appropriate for the brand.
In Advertising for Good, leaders from the industry’s top platforms emphasized the need for guardrails, transparency, brand safety, human review, and accountability. The message was clear: automation is most valuable when it expands human capability, not when it removes responsibility from the process.
Human judgment isn’t a constraint on automation. It’s what makes automation useful, responsible, and defensible. Marketers still need to set the strategy, define the boundaries, interpret the signals, and make the tradeoffs that machines cannot own on their behalf. The skills marketers want to build reflect that changing role: 95% are seeking training in strategic or uniquely human capabilities, including creative brainstorming and strategic planning.
4. Discovery continues to evolve
Discovery is no longer a single step in the funnel. It happens across platforms, communities, creators, search experiences, and conversations, often before marketers know a buyer is actively in-market.
Today’s buyers don’t move from awareness to consideration to decision in one neat line. Instead, they move dynamically between each phase, with the path from discovery to action often becoming much shorter in retail, where it’s easier than ever for buyers to take action immediately when a need arises.
Consumers spend more time within platform ecosystems and less time navigating traditional brand websites. That makes distinctiveness harder to earn. Three in five marketers say low-quality AI-generated content is making it more difficult to find content they genuinely enjoy—a reminder that more content can make meaningful content harder to discover. They crave realness and spend time in the places where they can find opportunities to chat and engage with their community.
The implication for brands is clear: personalization cannot simply mean producing more. It has to mean creating something relevant enough, recognizable enough, and human enough to earn attention.
The most effective personalized experiences feel authentic because they meet consumers where they already are. Marketers need creative and media systems that can adapt to changing contexts without losing consistency or control.
5. The next advantage will come from better connections
The most revealing moments weren’t always the ones on stage. They happened in the hallway, over matcha from Roku or coffee from Google, and in the conversations that continued after a session ended—when marketers compared notes, agencies challenged assumptions, and technology partners worked through what responsible modernization actually looks like.
Those conversations reinforced the purpose of ADVANCE. Moving advertising forward is not a solo exercise. It requires marketers, agencies, platforms, and technology partners to learn from one another and connect ideas across disciplines.
What comes next
ADVANCE 2026 left us with a useful challenge: stop measuring progress by how much marketing teams can produce and start measuring it by how much better they can decide.
That means connecting creative, media, intelligence, measurement, and human judgment—not as separate capabilities, but as parts of the same operating system.
The future of advertising will not be defined by AI output alone. It will be defined by whether that output helps marketers create work people value, make decisions businesses can defend, and deliver growth they can prove.
The conversation continues over the next few weeks. We’ll share deeper perspectives on the sessions, ideas, and conversations that shaped ADVANCE 2026.
*Statistics cited in this article are from the Smartly ADVANCE Thought Leadership Study 2026, conducted by Alter Agents among 500 marketers.
From AI Output to Accountable Growth: Five Key Takeaways from ADVANCE
For the past few years, marketing conversations have been dominated by one question: How should I use AI?
At ADVANCE 2026, that question started to feel a little incomplete, and the shift is already well underway. According to the Smartly ADVANCE Thought Leadership Study 2026, conducted by Alter Agents among 500 marketers, 99% of marketers are already using AI in advertising. The question is no longer whether AI belongs in the marketing workflow. It is what marketers choose to do with it—and what they decide should remain distinctly human.
Hosted at Spring Studios in New York City, ADVANCE 2026 brought together leaders from brands, agencies, and platforms to examine how advertising is changing as AI moves from experimentation to expectation. Across the stage and in the conversations between sessions, one idea kept returning: in an age of infinite output, meaningful connection has become a scarce resource.
The most valuable connections aren’t just between brands and consumers. They’re between creative and media, strategy and execution, data and clarity, AI and human judgment. When those work together, marketing teams can move faster without losing control, quality, or accountability.
Here are the ideas that stood out from ADVANCE 2026.
1. Creative volume isn’t the same as creative intelligence
AI has made it easier to produce more creative, faster. But more variations don’t automatically create more impact. Our research reflects that tension. Four in five marketers believe AI is best suited to enhancing human ideas, while 62% believe it risks flattening creativity. As Smartly CEO Laura Desmond shared in her opening remarks, “AI is used to supercharge human ideas, not replace them.” In other words, marketers are not rejecting AI. They are asking for a better division of labor.
The challenge now is building a system that can connect creative decisions to performance signals, audience context, and brand intent. That was the focus of The Creative Intelligence Advantage, where John Paulson, Managing Director at WPP Production, highlighted the point: “Scale doesn’t mean impact.”
The discussion made a useful distinction: creative shouldn’t be treated as a production output that disappears once an ad launches. It should be part of a continuous learning system—one that helps teams understand what resonates, why it is working, and what to make next.
For marketers, the implication is practical. The goal isn’t to use AI to fill every available placement with new assets. It’s to use intelligence to make creative more relevant, more coherent, and more accountable to the outcome it is meant to drive.
2. The buyer is in control, and marketing has to earn confidence
Modern buyers don’t move through a neat, linear funnel. B2B buyers research independently, compare options across channels, and often form an opinion before they ever speak with a sales team. That makes confidence (not just awareness) the central marketing challenge.
In The Buyer Is in Control: A New Framework for B2B Growth, Amy Hawthorne, Sr. Director of B2B Strategy and Transformation at LinkedIn, emphasized how critical it is to speak to all stakeholders and get in front of them early enough for it to count. Marketers don’t need to create more content for every stage of the journey. Instead, they need to create connected experiences that help each stakeholder understand the problem, trust the solution, and feel ready to act, before they enter the active buying cycle.
That requires alignment between brand, creative, media, and measurement. When those functions operate in isolation, buyers receive fragmented signals. When they work as a connected system, every interaction can build on the last one and move the buyer closer to a decision.
3. AI needs human judgment, governance, and a clear owner
Agents were, unsurprisingly, a hot topic of conversation all day long. But, as AI becomes part of everyday marketing operations, the question is no longer whether teams will use it. The question is how they will use it responsibly and how they will know when a human needs to step in.
The research suggests that marketers are already imagining this shift. Eighty-one percent say AI enables them to bring bigger projects and ideas to life than they could on their own. At the same time, marketers estimate that only around one in four workflows is fully replaceable by AI. AI may take on more of the formulaic work, but people still need to decide what is strategically important, creatively resonant, and appropriate for the brand.
In Advertising for Good, leaders from the industry’s top platforms emphasized the need for guardrails, transparency, brand safety, human review, and accountability. The message was clear: automation is most valuable when it expands human capability, not when it removes responsibility from the process.
Human judgment isn’t a constraint on automation. It’s what makes automation useful, responsible, and defensible. Marketers still need to set the strategy, define the boundaries, interpret the signals, and make the tradeoffs that machines cannot own on their behalf. The skills marketers want to build reflect that changing role: 95% are seeking training in strategic or uniquely human capabilities, including creative brainstorming and strategic planning.
4. Discovery continues to evolve
Discovery is no longer a single step in the funnel. It happens across platforms, communities, creators, search experiences, and conversations, often before marketers know a buyer is actively in-market.
Today’s buyers don’t move from awareness to consideration to decision in one neat line. Instead, they move dynamically between each phase, with the path from discovery to action often becoming much shorter in retail, where it’s easier than ever for buyers to take action immediately when a need arises.
Consumers spend more time within platform ecosystems and less time navigating traditional brand websites. That makes distinctiveness harder to earn. Three in five marketers say low-quality AI-generated content is making it more difficult to find content they genuinely enjoy—a reminder that more content can make meaningful content harder to discover. They crave realness and spend time in the places where they can find opportunities to chat and engage with their community.
The implication for brands is clear: personalization cannot simply mean producing more. It has to mean creating something relevant enough, recognizable enough, and human enough to earn attention.
The most effective personalized experiences feel authentic because they meet consumers where they already are. Marketers need creative and media systems that can adapt to changing contexts without losing consistency or control.
5. The next advantage will come from better connections
The most revealing moments weren’t always the ones on stage. They happened in the hallway, over matcha from Roku or coffee from Google, and in the conversations that continued after a session ended—when marketers compared notes, agencies challenged assumptions, and technology partners worked through what responsible modernization actually looks like.
Those conversations reinforced the purpose of ADVANCE. Moving advertising forward is not a solo exercise. It requires marketers, agencies, platforms, and technology partners to learn from one another and connect ideas across disciplines.
What comes next
ADVANCE 2026 left us with a useful challenge: stop measuring progress by how much marketing teams can produce and start measuring it by how much better they can decide.
That means connecting creative, media, intelligence, measurement, and human judgment—not as separate capabilities, but as parts of the same operating system.
The future of advertising will not be defined by AI output alone. It will be defined by whether that output helps marketers create work people value, make decisions businesses can defend, and deliver growth they can prove.
The conversation continues over the next few weeks. We’ll share deeper perspectives on the sessions, ideas, and conversations that shaped ADVANCE 2026.
*Statistics cited in this article are from the Smartly ADVANCE Thought Leadership Study 2026, conducted by Alter Agents among 500 marketers.
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