Sir Martin Sorrell, in his WPP heyday, famously referred to Google as a “frenemy.” As opposed to a mighty monster that would munch up his margins.

Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg escaped a similar soubriquet as far as we know but now, according to Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge and host of the Decoder podcast, Zuckerberg’s plan is to “more or less eliminate the entire advertising ecosystem, from creative on down.”

Patel is referencing an interview with Zuckerberg by Stratechery’s Ben Thompson where Zuckerberg says (of the impact of his AI on advertising): “Yeah, or we just make it for them. I mean, obviously, it’ll always be the case that they can come with a suggestion or here’s the creative that they want, especially if they really want to dial it in.

“But in general, we’re going to get to a point where you’re a business, you come to us, you tell us what your objective is, you connect to your bank account, you don’t need any creative, you don’t need any targeting demographic, you don’t need any measurement, except to be able to read the results that we spit out. I think that’s going to be huge, I think it is a redefinition of the category of advertising.”

Now presumably he’s only referring to ads on Facebook and his other platforms (unless he’s found a way of undermining everyone else) but Meta has just recorded Q1 2025 revenue of $42.3bn with net income (profit) jumping a dizzying 35% to $16.7bn. Publicis, the world’s biggest ad holding company last year, produced annual revenue of about $16bn, roughly equivalent to Meta’s Q1 profit.

As Patel concludes: “I’ve been calling this swirl of ideas for AI-powered advertising ‘infinite creative,’ and we’ve seen some interesting demos of it in the past, including at Nvidia keynotes. But I’ve never heard anyone pull the thread all the way to ‘connect us to your bank account and read the results we spit out,’ which would basically wipe out the entire ad industry as we know it.”

Something to look forward to then.