The advertising world's best-known power couple, creative and media, are ready to bury the hatchet and get back to working together.
For years, these two have been operating in separate silos, like the marketing world’s version of a 16-year-long Gallagher brother split. But SmartAssets' latest report offers hope: The proverbial band is getting back together, and AI is making it happen.
Still, today’s advertising ecosystems are a mishmash of fragmented organizations, disjointed teams, and a dizzying array of technologies that only partially deliver on a brief.
This fractured scenario is undermining the progress made with new technologies like AI, which is meant to make our efforts more accurate, intuitive, and efficient.
Where do we go from here?
The advertising landscape is overwhelming. The average person is exposed to nearly 400 ads a day, but they only spend around 9 minutes looking at them; that’s around one second per ad.
What’s even more surprising is only 5% of people believe they see anywhere near that many advertisement, according to a 2025 QuestDIY survey. It's a classic case of too many ads, not enough eyeballs.
“The global ad spend is set to hit a new high this year, with digital at a commanding lead. Most of that money is spent with just a handful of tech companies, mainly Google and Meta,” says Vitaly Boitelet, Chief Product Officer at SmartAssets.
As the media landscape continues to explode, consumers are going dark, with 60-80% of users expected to turn off cookies. This shift is pushing budgets toward performance media—even if the measurement isn't always accurate.
Advertisers are, understandably, growing frustrated.
So, how did creative and media get here? The dawn of cable TV was one of the main catalysts for the schism.
The sheer buying power of media allowed large media companies to grow and evolve; meanwhile, creative agencies were happy to dream up big ideas without media telling them what to do.
This led to an uneasy and often ineffective “marriage of inconvenience.”
But things are changing. Clients are demanding more integrated pitches from agencies, and 23% of advertisers now aim to consolidate media, creative, data, and technology into a single partner. Often, AI is the foundational glue holding it all together.
“While advertisers increasingly understand that AI can help them to do everything faster, at greater scale, with more efficiency and better accuracy; they are still struggling with execution," ”says Lindsay Hong, CEO of SmartAssets. "As many marketers plan to double down and increase their spending on AI, they should also be seeking expert advice to get the most out of these new tools."
"MadTech," the fusion of MarTech and AdTech, aims to fix today’s broken funnels by creating a more integrated, efficient, and growth-oriented ecosystem. The benefits of MadTech include better omnichannel personalization, stronger data governance, and the breaking down of internal silos.
When you add AI to the mix, MadTech becomes even more powerful, allowing for far more granular customer insights, real-time campaign adaptation, and automated testing and optimization. With AI, you can do everything from segmenting customers and creating ads to predicting ad effectiveness and testing creative at scale.
It’s clear that the future of advertising is integrated, and that’s good news for the ongoing relationship between creative and media.
Download SmartAssets’ full report to get a clear roadmap on how MadTech works in practice, and how creative and media can come together in the most impactful way.
