iProspect Indonesia’s Faheem Merchant: When AI Kills the Click, Brands Must Earn Inclusion
By Faheem Merchant, General Manager, iProspect, dentsu Indonesia.
For years, digital advertising has been about interruption. We targeted audiences, chased clicks, and competed for milliseconds of attention in crowded feeds. But something more fundamental is shifting, not just brands showing up, but how value is created and captured.
This is not the birth of another media channel. It is the beginning of an intent economy, where brands are rewarded not for being loud, but for being useful at the exact moment a decision is forming.
Generative AI has officially moved from hype to deployment. With infrastructure costs rising and competition intensifying, monetisation was inevitable. What’s new is how that monetisation works. ChatGPT, for example, is not optimised for discovery or entertainment, it is optimised for answers, and that changes everything.
From targeting people to solving problems
Traditionally, digital advertising has relied on proxies such as demographics, interests, keywords. GenAI collapses that entire system. Instead of guessing who someone might be, brands now compete on what the user is trying to solve. This marks a shift from static targeting to hyper-intent, from bidding on keywords to bidding on semantic context.
The most effective brand presence in AI environments will not feel like advertising at all. It will feel like the next best action in a conversation. In this world, relevance beats reach, context beats creative and usefulness becomes the most valuable brand asset.
This is why brandformance”, the long-promised convergence of branding and performance, finally becomes real. When an AI recommends a solution, there is no upper funnel or lower funnel. There is only the moment of trust.
The Algorithmic Moment of Truth
For decades, marketers optimised for the Zero Moment of Truth, the search result, the review, the comparison page. AI introduces a new battlefield with what we might call the Algorithmic Moment of Truth, the split second when an AI model decides which information to synthesise, which brands to mention, and which options to exclude entirely.
If your brand is not part of that retrieval path, not only will you lose the click, you will lose the conversation.
This is why the conversation is already moving beyond SEO toward Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO), because visibility is no longer about ranking first, it is about being understood, trusted, and structurally accessible to AI systems.
And unlike traditional search, there is no second page.
A reckoning for search
Much has been made about whether ChatGPT advertising will cannibalise social media budgets. In reality, the more immediate impact will be on search.
Social platforms remain powerful engines of discovery. GenAI competes somewhere else entirely. In the territory search has historically owned intent, decision-making, and problem-solving. When users ask an AI for advice, comparisons, or recommendations, they are signalling readiness. That is where budgets will shift first.
But the more interesting opportunity is not paid at all. It is organic. Brands that restructure their content, data, and knowledge systems for AI retrieval will earn disproportionate visibility without bidding wars.
The uncomfortable truth about measurement
AI also exposes a hard truth the industry has long avoided. Our measurement frameworks are no longer fit for purpose.
Marketing mix models and attribution systems were not designed to capture conversational influence. Early movers should resist the temptation to over- engineer attribution and instead focus on tangible signals such as marketplace clicks, local intent actions, and secondary search behaviour triggered by AI responses.
If AI creates curiosity that leads users to research further, that ripple effect matters, even if it does not show up neatly in a dashboard.
Why first-party data is no longer optional
There is a clear signal to the market. As AI platforms scale, brands cannot rely on platform-level reporting to understand performance.
This accelerates an unavoidable shift for brands to build independent data ecosystems. Measurement will depend less on what platforms choose to reveal, and more on the strength of a brand’s own data architecture, governance, and integration.
In the AI era, data maturity is not a martech issue but rather a competitive moat.
The real risk is trust
The biggest challenge ahead is not whether AI advertising works but whether and how it can work safely.
When AI hallucinates or amplifies bias, the brand risk is immediate and reputational. Guardrails must come before guidelines. Brands need operational contingencies, escalation protocols, and clear principles for how and where they show up in AI-mediated environments.
Trust, once broken by an AI interaction, is far harder to rebuild than a poorly targeted ad.
Build for answers, or be left out
We are witnessing a signal towards the next evolution of digital media that requires a re-architecture of marketing itself. The winners will be brands that prioritise structure over speed, ensuring that they redesign content, data, measurement, and governance for a world where AI is the interface between intent and action.
When AI becomes the answer, brands do not compete for attention anymore. They compete to deserve inclusion.