We sat down with to Clinch CEO and co-founder Oz Etzioni to discuss the impact of AI on advertising workflows…

Oz, orchestration is becoming a common term across ad tech. Why are we talking about it now?

Because we’ve reached a true inflection point. The industry is in the middle of an AI-driven renaissance, where, for the first time, creative and media are finally recognised as equal drivers of performance. Creative is no longer just the message, and media is no longer just distribution - they’re dynamic, interdependent growth engines. 

But here’s the issue: the infrastructure supporting them was built for a slower, simpler era. AI didn’t create the cracks in the system, it exposed them.

For years, advertisers stitched together workflows using point solutions: one for creative production, another for trafficking, another for media activation, and yet another for analytics. These systems were managed by siloed teams with disconnected KPIs. That model functioned when campaign volume and complexity were manageable. AI has changed the equation.

It has dramatically increased speed, scale, and variability. Campaigns now generate hundreds (or thousands) of creative permutations across channels, audiences, and moments. The disconnected systems that once “worked” are now under extreme pressure. Handoffs break. Data lags. Optimisation stalls.

What we’re seeing isn’t incremental friction, it’s structural collapse.

Sounds like a collapse of workflows has a major impact to an entire organisation 

It absolutely does, and differently at every level of the organisation.

At the executive level, CMOs are struggling to deliver performance at scale while maintaining brand integrity. CTOs are managing fragmented tech stacks that are expensive, redundant, and difficult to evolve, and innovation becomes risky and slow. CFOs are questioning efficiency and return as operational costs increase without proportional performance gains. CEOs are concerned about losing competitive advantage and market share, as faster, more agile competitors pull ahead. 

At the operational level, the strain is even more visible. Teams deal with daily bottlenecks, broken handoffs between creative and media, manual trafficking processes, duplicated workstreams, and reporting delays.

Speed and complexity keep increasing, but the bridge between creative and media simply can’t support the weight anymore.

Many advertisers try to fix this by optimising one part of the workflow at a time. Why doesn’t that work?

Because it actually makes things worse. You can’t patch a system that was never designed for this level of acceleration. If you scale creative without rethinking trafficking and activation, media complexity explodes. If you expand audiences and channels, analytics can’t keep up. If you add AI to generate more variations but don’t unify the workflow, you simply create more operational debt. 

Every localised optimisation creates a downstream bottleneck. YYou’re reinforcing a broken foundation instead of rebuilding it for the AI era.

So what’s the alternative?

Unification. Creative, media, strategy, optimization, and analytics must operate inside a single AI-accelerated workflow, not as disconnected phases. Creative is built with activation in mind. Media decisions inform messaging dynamically. Performance data feeds back into content in real time. Optimisation is no longer a post-campaign exercise, it’s continuous.

When everything operates as one system, speed and scale stop being liabilities and become advantages.

Where does data fit into this?

Data is the multiplier. When creative and media live in the same workflow, you unlock insights that were always there but never actionable. Performance data feeds directly back into creative decisions. Media signals inform messaging in real time. The platform becomes an insights engine, not just an execution tool. Finally brands can truly understand what works, and why, and be more efficient and effective in their activations. 

A few examples…

A global retailer runs dynamic creative across multiple regions. In a traditional workflow, performance data is reviewed weeks later, often disconnected from creative variables. In an orchestrated system, audience signals showing stronger engagement with value-led messaging in one region can automatically adjust copy, imagery, and product emphasis without restarting production cycles.

In another use case, an automotive brand launching across CTV, social, and display sees higher completion rates for certain feature-driven messaging among urban audiences. Rather than manually briefing creative teams to rework assets, the platform dynamically prioritises and scales those creative variations across channels where that audience is most active.

In both scenarios, media signals inform messaging in real time, and the platform becomes an insights engine, not just an execution tool. That’s when brands can truly understand what works, why it works, and how to scale it efficiently across the entire customer journey.

How does Clinch fit into this shift?

Clinch is an omnichannel AI content orchestration platform built to solve this exact problem. We enable teams to create content from the ground up at scale, activate it seamlessly across channels, and continuously learn from performance data, all in one place. No broken handoffs. No disconnected insights.

The impact is tangible: greater relevance for consumers, significant efficiency gains for teams, faster speed to market, and stronger performance across the entire customer journey—globally.

Final thought - what happens if brands don’t make this shift?

AI will keep accelerating, whether brands are ready or not. As complexity compounds, continuing to operate with yesterday’s workflows will become increasingly unsustainable. Especially as ecosystems expand, working with dozens of disconnected partners becomes a recipe for friction, inefficiency, and strategic misalignment.

Brands need to consolidate strategically, aligning partners and platforms with a long-term roadmap where everything flows seamlessly within a unified workflow.

The brands that win won’t just use AI tools. They’ll rethink their foundations.

Because in the AI era, performance won’t be determined by who has the most technology, it will be determined by who has the most orchestrated system.