In every wave of technology, advertising is both the first mover and the latecomer. The first because brands are always willing to try something new if it gives them attention. The latecomer because the industry tends to mistake novelty for infrastructure. We saw this with the early internet. Banner ads and "hits" passed for strategy. We saw it with social: "likes" were confused with sales. Now we are seeing it again with AI.
Foundation models represent something fundamentally different from previous technological waves. They are not tools that do one thing well. They are platforms that can be adapted to do many things—generating creative, analyzing audiences, personalizing content, predicting trends—all from the same underlying architecture.
For brands, this matters because it collapses the gap between insight and execution. Traditional advertising workflows involve separate systems for audience research, creative development, media planning, and performance analysis. Foundation models can compress these steps, enabling faster iteration and more responsive campaigns.
But the real opportunity lies in customization. Generic foundation models produce generic outputs. Brands that invest in fine-tuning models on their own data—their brand voice, their visual identity, their audience behaviors—will create AI systems that produce distinctly branded content at scale.
The challenge is data quality. A foundation model fine-tuned on poor data produces poor results, consistently and at scale. This is where the connection to licensed, culturally relevant training data becomes critical. Brands operating in diverse markets need models trained on content that reflects those markets—not generic Western datasets applied globally.
The brands that will lead in the AI era are those that treat foundation models as infrastructure investments, not experiments. They will build proprietary fine-tuning datasets, establish governance frameworks for AI-generated content, and develop internal capabilities for prompt engineering and model evaluation.
Foundation models for advertising are not a trend. They are the next layer of marketing infrastructure. The question for brands is not whether to invest, but how quickly they can build the data and operational foundations to compete.