Twenty-five is as good a milestone as any to make an appraisal of Pakistan’s advertising industry; of the challenges overcome, the opportunities missed, the achievements secured and, perhaps most importantly, the lessons learnt.

Twenty-five years is a lot to pack in, especially looked at from the vantage point of 1998. For sure, advertising’s brave professionals have been no slackers. Far from it; they have boldly seized every opportunity that came their way to adopt, adapt and move forward. In 1998, the digital transformation that was to engulf us was in baby steps mode. In fact, the word digital had yet to reach the ubiquity it has now attained. The buzzword was “the information superhighway” (who even says this now?) and emergent platforms were coined as “new media”, belying the lack of prescience in understanding the extent to which digitisation (a word that had not made it to the lexicon) would embed itself in the way we live our lives today.

In 1998, the hard topics that were exercising the minds of the profession were the entry of the media buying houses, the quest for global affiliations, the opening of private TV channels and the FM revolution, with Pakistani consumers rediscovering the joys of radio. Along the way, agencies adapted to new models as the media houses entrenched themselves, bringing with them global tools aimed at measuring reach and ROI, and in the process divesting the advertising agencies of their traditional media function and their traditional revenue models – the sacrosanct 15% commission. Agencies then ditched the 360-degree model, deciding that specialisation was the way forward, only to later revise the model and finally settling for proclaiming themselves as ultimate brand custodians and sole arbiters of the creative mandate – a model that is now under considerable pressure and increasingly dismissed as the domain of what are termed ‘legacy’ agencies.

All this feels like an awfully long time ago and one may be forgiven for thinking (mistakenly) that anything which happened before 2014 was small stuff compared to the world in 2024.

This said, there is no denying that the rate of technological advancement has been and remains breathtaking, so that from the standpoint of 2024, it could be said with some certitude that almost every aspect of human endeavour has been defined by four transformative events; technological advancement, the Covid pandemic, the birth of Gen Z and the advent of generational AI.

Advancements in technology have brought us a world that 25 years ago was unimaginable, spawning the changes we talk about today, a world that is now being shaped and accelerated by Gen Z, the post-pandemic fallout and the impact of AI.

Gen Z in itself represents a transformative generational event, so that the passing of the baton that used to happen within intervals of 25 to 30 years has been compressed to almost half the time, resulting in the coexistence of two overlapping generations – the Millennials (quasi digital natives) and Gen Z (post digital natives), and although it is a truism that every generation brings its own particular set of influences to bear on the way the world works, it is equally true that no generation before Gen Z has had such pronounced particularities, by virtue of their ability to seamlessly inhabit both the online and the offline worlds.

The pandemic’s impact has been equally transformative, forcing non-digital generations as well as businesses into digital adoption.

AI is the change that is upon us. It is both a promise and a threat. AI has been around for longer than some of us may realise. What has changed is that it has now seeped into the realms of the ordinary; doing ordinary stuff that ordinary people can do. In that sense, AI is becoming as indispensable as many aspects of the online world are, or going back further in time, as indispensable as electricity, the telephone and air travel. The big difference are the implicit dangers contained within AI’s potential, and anyone who dismisses this with blithe references to the fears expressed over the internet, will have to think again.

So yes, an awful lot has happened over the past 25 years – and most of it in the last 10 years, and most of it for the good. And yes, Pakistan’s advertising industry has navigated these unchartered waters as well as most, sustaining brands in their quest for market leadership, all the while re-engineering operational frameworks and business models in order to remain relevant. Innovation, however, still eludes the industry, but that would be to forget that amidst these swirling and exciting developments, this industry has had to endure repeated periods of political instability, business uncertainty and financial crunches. To have adapted, survived and continued to deliver in such turbulent conditions is an achievement in itself.