AI, Automation & the Future Adman: How Technology Will Rewrite the Advertising Industry AI is no longer a distant disruption for Uganda’s advertising industry; it’s already in the room, sitting beside the brief and inside the client’s dashboard. From hand-cut layouts and painted billboards to programmatic buying and prompt-led ideation, the work is being rewired in real time. The future adman won’t win by fearing or worshipping the machine, but by mastering it, with culture, ethics, systems, and human judgment intact.

If the first four parts of this MadMen, Dreamers and Deal-Makers series were about the machine, how it was built from accidents, battered by economics, bruised by burnout, and handed to a new generation, this part is about something stranger. What happens when the machine learns to think? Not “think” like a creative director pacing in Kololo at 2 am, or a media buyer staring at a GRP spreadsheet. Think in code. In predictions. In prompts. When the tools you once used to execute your ideas start quietly suggesting ideas of their own. For nearly four decades, Uganda’s advertising engine…