Over the past few decades, the influence of the Internet, digital media and e-commerce has had a huge impact on consumer marketing and shaken up the traditional structure and dynamics of the world’s advertising and market research agencies. While AI will further accelerate the change, in my MxMIndia column this fortnight, I outline the blossoming opportunity for a new kind of marketing services agency.
Time moves fast. AI seems to move faster. Three years after I first wrote about the Diffusion of AI, a revisit reveals that it has moved from the challenging “chasm” phase to storming through the world like a “tornado”. In this fortnight’s MxMIndia column, while marvelling at its speed, I find that AI is an ecosystem that needs to share its bounty with the users, unlike the creators of social media platforms, who only harvest their attention and engagement. The best catalysts for harnessing AI’s full potential are its users, provided AI platforms treat them as partners and co-creators.
Increasingly, as the world worries about where AI will take us. Will it lead to economic disaster as Big Tech engages in a multi-trillion-dollar race towards AGI? Will it create a cornucopia of productivity leaps that benefit everybody, or will it lead to a jobs desert for the educated young and only enable the big cats to line their pockets further? In today’s MxMIndia column, I ponder the spectre of job losses and discover that the threat of AI in the work sphere is best combated by the promise of AI in the sphere of professional education.
As the worthies gather in Delhi to discuss the potential of AI, a distinct peril looms on the horizon as OpenAI prepares to introduce advertising into ChatGPT. My post today does my bit to sound the alarm.
As the world debates how AI will change the very rhythms of human society, I find it interesting and useful to contemplate how the Internet and the smart phone have done so. In this post I explore an interesting framework to do so.
As years go, 2025 will probably be remembered in the short term as an “annus horribulus” given its geopolitics and the overall state of the world. However, over the longer arc of history, it will probably be remembered as part of the beginning of the age of AI. In my MxMIndia column this fortnight, I look forward to 2026 in the light of the longer frame.
Back in 2019, when I first wrote about Narrative Coherence as a brand equity dimension, social media, influencer and performance marketing were beginning to push traditional advertising to the margins. In 2025, as the transition is almost complete and another transition – the age of AI – looms, I revisit the topic
The Internet and smartphones have led to a paradigm shift in the role of communication in human life, culture, and society. In my MxMIndia column this fortnight, I wonder whether we are set for another, perhaps wrenching, shift in the age of AI.
Over my four decades in advertising, the last decades have seen the most change. The mean constraints of performance marketing, the obscurities of Big Data and soon the uncharted territory of AI. To regain its mojo, advertising needs to be more creative — not less —more in touch with the human side of the consumer, and move towards realising its potential as an art form. This fortnight, my MxMIndia column cloaks this thought in the form of a new theory of advertising. Sort of.
I have been at the interface of marketing research and marketing communication all my career. While marketing research has been slow to change over the decades, I can now discern the beginnings of a tectonic shift. This blog post posits the coming changes.
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