Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Creative Communication: Adoption and Ethical Challenges among Branding Agencies in Nigeria

The emergence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is viewed as one of the most significant breakthroughs in creative communication, reshaping how branding agencies engage in ideation, content creation, graphic design, and customer engagement. This paper examines AI's growing role in creative communication and branding, and situates this role within the wider digital transformation reshaping business practice. It then turns to how these developments are unfolding among branding agencies in Nigeria specifically, where AI adoption is accelerating but remains uneven, constrained by infrastructural limitations and a scarcity of localised data. The paper further considers the ethical challenges this adoption raises, including questions of originality and authorship, copyright, algorithmic bias, transparency and accountability, and data privacy. Drawing on available literature, the paper argues that AI is best used as an auxiliary tool that complements rather than replaces human creativity, and it concludes with recommendations for developing industry-specific ethical guidelines to support the responsible adoption of AI by branding agencies in Nigeria.