CEOs discuss redefining creative and media with AI

WPP Media MENA CEO, Amer El Hajj, and Memac Ogilvy MENA CEO, Ghassan Maraqa, collaborate to highlight how the old wall between creative and media has been broken down by WPP Open, which enhances integrated capabilities, enables creative amplification and turns media fragmentation into a competitive advantage.

The creative world today is being increasingly homogenised, with creative outputs echoing one another in style, substance and spirit. This standardisation, resulting from the democratisation of artificial intelligence (AI), is often described as the most significant challenge to the creative, media and communications sectors today.

But to see AI as merely a set of tools is to miss the transformative change it brings by influencing our thinking processes, creative habits and how we interact with the world. By rechannelling our collective human knowledge, AI serves as an invaluable input to create our next output, not just another toolkit.

The risk of descending into the law of averages – the standardisation – is not because AI tools are accessible to all, but because the feedback loop that it offers, when not leveraged well, will inevitably undermine the impact of human ideas.

For agencies such as Ogilvy, renowned for its ‘borderless creativity,’ the challenge is to shift from AI-led replication, which is increasingly the industry norm, to genuine creative amplification. This means harnessing AI to elevate human ingenuity, not to standardise it, ensuring that creativity is insightful, strategic and emotionally resonant in a way that algorithms alone cannot replicate.

“The same intelligent platform that powers creative amplification also enables us to build custom media workflows and deploy specialised agents at any scale.”

Focusing on creative amplification fundamentally changes the role of the agency. By drawing on an intelligent operating platform such as WPP Open to automate repetitive and time-consuming tasks, we create room for our teams to move beyond execution and focus on providing the high-level strategic counsel and elevate the creative product to help clients navigate complex market challenges.

When clients are also brought into the ecosystem the value becomes exponential. By onboarding clients directly onto a shared platform such as WPP Open, we create a transparent, collaborative environment. Here, clients can work alongside us to add and interrogate briefs, ensuring alignment from the very start. This framework is built on a foundation of trust, where all proprietary client data remains protected within secure guardrails.

The platform is already marking a significant move now towards agentic AI, providing an ecosystem of tools with the capability of creating specialised AI agents for different workflows. These agents are infused with the right brand knowledge and works with real-time information from a wide array of external sources, leading to creative breakthroughs.

On the creative side, the focus is on amplification over replication. In media, the same platform and agentic capability extend to an equally critical challenge: Fragmentation. The consumer journey today is fractured – social, streaming, e-commerce and retail are all competing for attention with no connective thread. For brands, this means data sitting in silos, budgets spread thin and a real struggle to deliver anything that feels connected or personal.

The root cause is familiar. Just as creative faces a disconnect between AI output and genuine strategic thinking, media contends with a similar gap between data intelligence and execution. Brands have mountains of first party data but lack the infrastructure to connect it to how media is planned and bought. Campaigns default to generic, insights sit unused, and proving return on investment (ROI) becomes exponentially harder.

The demand for personalisation at scale is real – but until now, the operational complexity made it nearly impossible to deliver. This is where WPP Open becomes the common thread. The same intelligent platform that powers creative amplification also enables us to build custom media workflows and deploy specialised agents at any scale – not just to manage fragmentation, but to turn it into a genuine competitive advantage.

And the shift happening in creative is mirrored in media. We’ve been working closely with our teams to ensure this transformation lands across process, product and people. Our talent is moving from manual execution to strategic oversight – delivering stronger outcomes for clients while accelerating their own professional growth.

The old wall between creative and media is gone. With WPP Open as the shared foundation, what was once two separate conversations is now one integrated capability. Growth in 2026 won’t come from louder messages – it’ll come from smarter connections. We’re not just helping our clients navigate what’s next. We’re building it, together.