By Tammy H. Nam, CEO of Creatopy
When OpenAI launched its image generation capabilities inside ChatGPT a few weeks ago, it sent a ripple (A wave? A tsunami?) through the advertising world. Now, as the initial buzz settles, the implications are coming into sharper focus. This wasn’t just another AI feature drop. It was a major milestone in making AI-powered creative truly mainstream.
What changed? Accessibility.
Yes, AI image tools have been around for years. But by putting one directly inside ChatGPT—an app half a billion people use every week—OpenAI lowered the barrier to entry in a massive way. There’s no new software to learn, no additional sign-ups and no technical chops required. The result? Anyone in a marketing org—from a brand director to an intern—can now generate visuals on demand, instantly.
That kind of ubiquity is different from innovation. It’s normalisation. And it signals something bigger than a single product release.
We’re entering an era where creative speed is assumed, and where AI isn’t a specialised tool. It’s part of the default stack. The implications for marketers and agencies are profound, and we’d be wise not to underestimate the shift.
Creative speed is now a baseline expectation
With a few lines of text, you can produce everything from a rough concept to a surprisingly polished ad visual. In seconds. This collapses the early stages of the creative process—brainstorming, moodboarding, mocking up—into a real-time, iterative flow. It’s no longer a linear process gated by resources or expertise. It’s conversational, collaborative, immediate.
But when speed becomes universal, it stops being a competitive advantage. Strategy becomes the differentiator. The question isn’t “How fast can we make something?” but “Are we making the right thing, in the right voice, for the right moment?”
AI can help you generate content, but it can’t define your brand narrative or understand the emotional nuance of your audience. That still takes human insight. The marketers who win in this new landscape will be the ones who use AI to accelerate their thinking, not replace it.
Brand control is under pressure
One of the most immediate challenges we’re hearing from marketing leaders is brand consistency. When anyone on the team can spin up an image in seconds, the risk of going off-brand—visually or tonally—increases dramatically.
This doesn’t mean locking down creativity. It means evolving brand governance for the AI era. Clear design systems, approved prompt libraries and integrated review workflows will become essential. Companies that get this right will turn brand consistency into a true advantage, creating more content without sacrificing cohesion or quality.
We’re already seeing forward-thinking teams explore how to integrate these tools into their creative pipelines without losing control. Expect to see more CMOs investing in systems that combine flexibility with oversight.
Measurement is the new bottleneck
If AI speeds up content creation, it also raises the stakes for performance data. We can now test dozens of creative variations in a single campaign sprint—but without timely, actionable insights, that velocity goes to waste.
The traditional launch-wait-analyse-iterate cycle is too slow for this new pace. Instead, marketers need tighter, real-time feedback loops that connect content creation with audience response. Tools that integrate creation, publishing and performance tracking into a single workflow will become critical.
In other words, creative iteration doesn’t just need to be faster. It needs to be smarter. The best teams will treat every piece of content as a hypothesis, and every campaign as a learning engine.
So what now?
The launch may have happened weeks ago, but we’re just beginning to see the real impact unfold. The ad industry is waking up to a new reality: the tools are changing fast, and with them, the expectations of what marketers can deliver—and how fast.
Here are three things I’d suggest every brand and agency leader do now:
- Experiment internally. Give your team room to explore. See where AI tools spark creativity, and where they cause confusion. Use that intel to guide smart adoption.
- Update your brand playbook. Include AI-specific guidance: prompt templates, review steps, examples of what “on-brand” means in this new context.
- Close the loop between content and performance. Don’t let AI outpace your measurement. If you’re producing faster, you need to learn faster too.
The tools will keep evolving. That much is certain. But this moment—the one we’re in right now—is about adaptation. Not to the tools themselves, but to the new cadence of creative work they’re enabling.
When I get asked the inevitable question of what keeps me up at night, my answer is always the same: the pace of business. That’s especially true today. We’re not just moving faster. We’re moving differently. And that’s what makes this moment such a big deal.
