Here, Stephen Wright, global media lead at TrinityP3, reflects on the humAIn conference in Sydney yesterday and why creatives’ widely held concerns around AI should also be shared by media agencies.
Attending the HumAIn 2026 conference on AI in marketing and creativity in Sydney on Tuesday, one could not help noticing that media planning and buying was entirely absent from the official agenda.
Yet, listening to the debates taking place across the creative disciplines, the conference offered a remarkably sharp lens on the structural intersection where creative content and media execution meet.
The overwhelming sentiment echoing throughout the creative sessions was a strong note of caution against over-reliance on artificial intelligence.
Creative leaders rightly observed that AI has made genuine brand distinction infinitely more difficult to achieve. While machine learning excels at delivering scale and operational efficiency to protect bottom-line margins, it actively frustrates a brand’s ability to generate top-line growth and build a meaningful emotional connection with an audience. Commoditised thinking inevitably breeds creative sameness.
In marketing, brand connection is the foundation of customer acquisition and retention; it is the sole reason people choose your brand and continue choosing it over time. When you strip that distinctiveness away, you surrender your commercial pricing power.
The dilemma facing modern media planning mirrors this creative crisis almost exactly. Artificial intelligence has established two distinct battlegrounds in media, and marketers must recognise that they now need to compete on both.
The first battleground belongs to algorithms, data architecture, and performance delivery. The application of machine learning is hardly a novelty in media; the industry has relied on predictive algorithms, automated bidding tools, and algorithmic systems for more than twenty years.
The recent acceleration in processing power simply means these tools now identify which channels generate direct sales faster, more reliably, and with greater precision than ever before.
Yet these technical advances raise the floor, not the ceiling. As every marketing department and agency within a category gains access to the identical automated toolsets, the algorithms inevitably reach the exact same mathematical conclusions.
They funnel every competing advertiser toward the exact same proven media environments.
At that precise moment, two classic media principles kick back in with brutal clarity: cut-through and share of voice.
When every competitor converges on the same algorithmic sweet spot, brands find themselves brawling for customer attention within a shrinking pool of the proven. For a challenger brand, this dynamic is fatal. A smaller advertiser cannot survive an automated auction against category market leaders who possess vastly superior budgets.
This is where the structural limitations of artificial intelligence become glaringly obvious. AI is essentially walking backwards into the future, because it can only analyse historical data.
In examining the award-winning media campaigns of the past two years, more than eighty per cent of that work could never have been identified, modeled, or recommended by an algorithm. Those campaigns succeeded because of bespoke initiatives, unexpected cultural alignments, new programmes, and unorthodox media placements that drove significant top-line business growth. It is impossible to see how an automated tool could ever replicate the lateral thinking and human imagination required to invent those opportunities out of thin air.
This brings us to the second battleground: left-field human thinking. This is the territory where original ideas amplify the commercial return of every media dollar spent.
The algorithmic battleground remains commercially necessary, but competitive advantages built purely on technology are inherently fleeting. Software is copied, commoditised, and superseded by newer platforms at an alarming rate. True commercial leverage lies in the creative media thinking that elevates a brand beyond the algorithmic baseline.
Unfortunately, high-end strategic media thinking is currently in remarkably short supply. Two decades of reliance on automated planning tools have produced a generation of planners who treat software output as infallible gospel. Genuine media strategy has been quietly replaced by implementation planning, while unconventional ideas are discarded because a dashboard cannot forecast them with mathematical certainty.
This intellectual deficit has been compounded by broader industry fragmentation. Strategic account planners have largely vanished from creative agencies, while corporate advertisers increasingly carve up media budgets without any overarching strategic framework.
Enterprise clients routinely allocate capital between an internal digital performance team and an external media agency well before anyone has formulated an umbrella strategy to rationalise that division. The customer connection is short-changed, and the capacity to develop customised, left-field media alternatives is severely diminished.
Moving forward, the first battleground of algorithmic optimisation will yield steadily diminishing returns as it becomes a standard commodity. The second battleground of human strategy and imagination is where media agencies will genuinely win or lose business.
Media and creative disciplines can no longer afford to operate as isolated silos. To discover uncontested spaces where a brand can cut through the noise, creative media execution must blur seamlessly into the content itself. In that sense, the opportunities are not merely running in parallel; they are essentially one and the same.
TrinityP3 is a supporter and B&T is the media partner of HumAIN 2026.
