What AI Does To India’s Advertising Cost Advantage
India’s advertising cost advantage has two parts that are usually discussed as one. Separating them explains which half is exposed and which is not.
The first is domestic: campaigns cost less to make here because the people who make them are paid less than their equivalents elsewhere. The second is export: global networks moved production, versioning, retouching and increasingly strategy support into Indian delivery centres for the same reason.
Which Part Of The Advertising Cost Advantage Is Exposed
The export half, and specifically the volume end of it. Adaptation, resizing, versioning and retouching are exactly the tasks generative tools do adequately and instantly, and they were the tasks that filled the seats.
An advantage built on doing predictable work cheaply is fragile against anything that does predictable work for almost nothing. That is not a prediction about the future, it is a description of what those tools already do.
Which Part Is Not
Anything requiring judgement about India. A market this linguistically and culturally fragmented is genuinely difficult to serve from outside, and that difficulty is not a cost problem, so cheaper tools do not touch it.
The work that was outsourced here because it was cheap is the work most at risk. The work that is here because it has to be is not.
The Uncomfortable Implication
The delivery-centre model recruited heavily at the entry level, on the basis that volume work funded training and training produced the next generation. If the volume work leaves, the training pipeline goes with it, and that is a slower and more serious loss than the revenue.
Nobody has yet described how the senior people of 2035 get made if the work that trained them is the work being automated first. See what happens to training programmes, which is the same problem inside a single agency rather than across a market.
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