According to Canva’s State of Marketing and AI 2026 report, 97% of marketing leaders now use AI daily, and 99% plan to increase their AI investment in 2026.
That matters because when almost every newsroom, ad ops team, and creative desk has access to the same AI capabilities, those capabilities become less of a competitive edge.
Speed used to separate the publishers pulling ahead from everyone else. But as AI makes speed easier to achieve, it’s becoming harder to differentiate on speed alone.
That doesn’t mean speed has stopped mattering. It still shows up on the P&L. Faster campaign launches mean revenue lands sooner, costs come down, and tighter turnaround can help win deals that might otherwise go to whoever can move first. Nobody is arguing for slower. Speed still creates revenue opportunities.
But here’s what’s becoming clear: velocity without direction just means more of the same, faster.
More ad variants of creative that were never quite on-brand. More localized versions of a campaign that wasn’t working in the first place.
The publishers pulling ahead aren’t necessarily the fastest ones. They’re the ones that have paired speed with judgment.
The engine and the compass
Think of it like this: AI gave every publisher a much bigger engine. Instant generation, scale, localization, all of it, on demand, across every title in the portfolio. The ability to produce more, faster, is no longer the constraint.
But an engine without a compass doesn’t get you anywhere useful. It just covers more ground, potentially in the wrong direction, more efficiently than before.
The same principle applies to creative production. Velocity moves you faster. Direction, judgment, taste, brand sense, and an understanding of what each brand actually stands for, determines whether you’re getting somewhere worth going.
Without that direction, publishers can produce more creative, more quickly, and at greater scale without necessarily improving the quality of what they put into the market. More output doesn’t automatically create more value. When the work spans multiple markets and advertiser relationships, scaling production only scales the problem if the creative is off-brand or ineffective.
One without the other isn’t a complete solution. Speed creates the capacity to do more. Direction determines whether that capacity creates something valuable.
What direction actually looks like in practice
So what does human judgment actually look like when creative production is moving at AI speed?
For publishers, especially regional and local ones, it has to show up in the workflow. These teams are under constant pressure to produce more ad campaigns, faster, with leaner teams. Their advertisers are often small local businesses that arrive without formal brand guidelines, properly formatted logos, or ready-to-use creative assets. That creates a bottleneck that slows the sales cycle and puts even more pressure on already stretched sales and AdOps teams.
Direction means building the right checks into that process:
- Brand guardrails set before generation: Not a style guide sitting in a shared drive nobody opens, but constraints built into the workflow itself, so every brand’s voice and tone, along with advertiser standards, hold even when output scales tenfold.
- A human review and QA checkpoint built into the workflow: Not bolted on at the end as a bottleneck, but placed where it can catch problems before they multiply across editions, markets, and placements.
- AI removes the grunt work, not the judgment: The point of speed is to free creative teams for the decisions that actually require taste and brand sense. Designer-in-the-loop, not designer-out-of-the-loop. If AI is also making the calls that require judgment, you haven’t gained direction. You’ve simply automated the drift.
This is the real shift publishers need to make. The instinct with any new capability is to ask, “How much faster can this go?” The better question is: “Faster toward what, exactly, and who’s making sure it stays true to the brand?”
Building the compass in
This is the problem Mediaferry’s infrastructure is built to solve. It uses AI to accelerate creative work, automate repetitive production tasks, and increase output without taking creative control out of the process.
With assisted production, publishers can move from brief to finished creative faster, shortening sales cycles and getting campaigns to market sooner while keeping human judgment in the loop for higher-value creative work.
With automated production, publishers can reduce reliance on studio time and eliminate repetitive work across adaptations, resizing, formatting, and other repeatable tasks. The result is fewer delays, fewer errors, and faster turnaround without asking designers to spend their time on work that can be automated.
The compass is built into the workflow:
- Brand guardrails before generation
Brand guidelines and legal standards are built into the production process, helping ensure creative stays consistent across channels as output increases. - Creative consistency across formats
The same brand identity can carry across print, digital, and video, helping publishers deliver more variations without losing consistency. - Quick adaptations
Creative can be adapted for different campaigns, audiences, and channels, making it easier to scale variations and create opportunities for upselling. - Human backup when judgment matters
When AI-generated creative needs refinement or a campaign calls for a more bespoke approach, designers can step in with human-in-the-loop review and creative direction.
Built-in quality control and artwork preflight catch compliance and spec issues before delivery, not after. An approval workflow, with visual markups, custom approval paths, and integrated messaging between sales, AdOps, and advertisers, keeps human judgment in the process without turning it into a bottleneck that cancels out the speed gains.
Put together, that’s not a constraint on velocity. It’s what makes velocity worth having. The goal isn’t simply to produce more ads faster. It’s to give publishers the ability to move quickly without becoming generic, inconsistent, or disconnected from what each advertiser is trying to achieve.
And that speed has a direct commercial payoff. Sales teams can build and present a finished, on-brand spec ad during the pitch itself, rather than waiting days for creative production to catch up. The faster the path from opportunity to campaign-ready creative, the less likely a deal is to stall while everyone waits for the work to get done.
The bar has moved
Speed used to be a competitive advantage. But as AI makes faster production accessible to more publishers, speed alone is no longer enough to stand out.
The publishers pulling ahead are the ones that have built a compass to go with the engine. They know where they’re going, what they’re trying to achieve, and where human judgment needs to stay in the process.
Velocity gets you moving. Direction gets you somewhere worth arriving.
Mediaferry helps publishers turn creative velocity into revenue, combining AI-powered production with the direction, brand context, and human judgment needed to create better advertising, faster.
Meet our Global Account Director Puneet Lamba and Solutions Consultant Jennifer Kisser at the America’s Newspapers Senior Leadership Conference on Sept 28–30 in Washington, D.C.
