I will admit without shame that I really like commercials. Artful, funny, weird, emotional — TV commercials were the TikTok of my childhood, before any of us were using terms like “short-form video.” But like most creative things in my life, AI is taking the joy out of it. And this year it’s going to get even worse.
Advertisements are mini-movies, posters, pictures, and photoshoots that have one underlying purpose: to burn whatever product they’re pushing into your brain as quickly as possible. This requires a great deal of creativity, and in some cases, a substantial production budget. And while the creative in me loves to see the fruits of that labor, it also makes ads the ideal testing ground for generic AI technology, as brands race to make content creation faster and cheaper. Many image and video generator models saw huge visual improvements last year, prompting more advertisers to adopt them in campaigns.
according to a marketing week StudyMore than half of the 1,000 brand marketers surveyed expect to use some form of AI in their creative campaigns in 2025. Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) found that 90 percent of advertisers were using, or planning to use, generative AI for video ads in 2025, and predicted that such tools would be used in 40 percent. All Advertisement till 2026.
This is why we’re increasingly seeing AI ads on TV magazineAnd on social media. Some are obvious about using generic AI, like Coca-Cola’s sloppy holiday ads, but many aren’t – making everything we see appear a little “unusual.” Sometimes, it may be humans who provide the uncanny valley experiences, as we have seen in advertisements McDonald’s And Doordash Where people look too civilized and move in unnatural ways. Or perhaps CGI and visual effects that transform in inconsistent ways that would be strange for a VFX artist to do intentionally, like This ad is for Original Source Shower Gel. Why does that man’s face keep changing? Why keep trying to convert it into Memoji?
But while the generation in commercials may seem obvious to some, clocking an AI in the wild isn’t something most humans aren’t good at yet. Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) found that humans can accurately identify AI-generated images, video and audio only 50 percent of the time, and this is one of the higher success rates we have seen. Kantar, the market research company that helped develop Coca-Cola’s AI holiday campaign in 2024, also found that most of its ad testers could not tell that it was AI-generated, despite tell-tale visuals and clear on-screen AI disclosure.
“Most people didn’t notice the ad was AI-generated (we asked)”
“The people who matter most – Coca-Cola’s target audience – still enjoy it, feel good when they look at it, and love the brand for it,” Kantar’s managing director Dom Boyd told Campaign. “Very. In fact, Kantar (ad testing) shows that most people didn’t notice that the ad was AI-generated (we asked), and the execution for short-term sales potential is one of the highest performing this year.”
However, audience reactions to AI ads have been mixed. one in November 2025 Kantar StudyConsumers were discouraged from ads that included obvious AI signals such as “distracting or unnatural scenes”, but they responded well to ads that used AI well enough to go largely undetected. The same study also found that people’s emotional reactions to AI-generated ads are stronger than those created without it – but the reactions in question were generally negative.
We see that negativity around explicit AI ads on all platforms and in the notes On social media platforms. there is even one r/AiSlopAds subreddit Community dedicated to publicly shaming examples of AI ads. A number of reasons have been commonly cited for this sentiment, including ethical and environmental concerns around generative AI, seeing its purported cost-cutting and efficiency benefits as something that makes branding cheaper, and just thinking that it doesn’t sound attractive.
Money (duh) is the obvious reason more brands are increasingly willing to risk that negativity to explore generic AI. Sure, there are AI ads for prediction market platform Kalshi Despised by Reddit usersBut one particularly strange and confusing example that aired during a primetime 2025 nba finals The slot cost only $2,000 to build. was created in just two days By a person using Google’s Veo 3 AI model. It’s not hard to see the appeal of that efficiency, and passionate hatred of an ad suggests that people found it memorable, even if for the wrong reasons.
A memorable advertisement can become a company’s legacy. The famous “Just Do It” (1988) Nike slogan was created for the fitness company First major television campaign by Wyden and Kennedy, with accompanying advertisements featuring everyday people getting their workout in. UK readers may also remember 1999 Guinness “Surfer” advertisement (Directed by Jonathan Glazer with the ABM BBDO advertising agency), the internationally acclaimed masterpiece of advertising, which took nine days to film in Hawaii, using pioneering visual effects to merge live-action, heavy-water surfing with CGI horses.
Production budgets for commercials are often not disclosed, but when made traditionally, they can cost significantly more. Media spends for Old Spice “The man your man can smell like.” Estimated to be $10 million, it was smaller than many major advertising campaigns aired in 2010. There is also the iconic “1984” advertisement directed by Ridley Scott to introduce the Apple Macintosh computer, which reportedly had a then-unprecedented production budget of $900,000, equivalent to $2.8 million in 2026.
These famous ads aren’t memorable because they’re nonsense. Coca-Cola says its AI holiday ads are a success, but they’ve replicated its iconic Red Truck campaign, which is already something Was Decades of positive memories through genuine human creativity and production efforts.
But creating a successful campaign entirely through generative AI may be challenging now, but will become easier as tools and models continue to improve. The tech and media world is now counting on it as major brands like Nestlé, Mondelez and Coca-Cola have already set an example. Google and Microsoft have created ads using their own generative AI models, and Amazon is giving sellers the tools to populate their sites with AI ads. Meta is expected to introduce fully automated AI ads on its social platforms this year, and Nvidia is building tools that can serve up an infinite variety of custom personalized video ads.
“I don’t waste any time worrying about whether AI will replace us as humans.”
Even the marketers behind beloved, iconic commercials are in on it. ABM BBDO has launched its own AI platform, and Wyden and Kennedy are openly using AI in their production pipelines. “I think AI is an incredibly powerful tool, but it’s still a tool,” Wyden & Kennedy CEO Neil Arthur said in a LinkedIn News Interview. “I think it allows us to scale more efficiently, but I don’t waste any time worrying about whether AI will replace us as humans.”
The use of generative AI in advertising is expected to be so widespread this year that early trends are already anticipating a resistance movement aimed at building loyalty with consumers who want to avoid synthetic content.
Thom Glover, founder of creative agency American Haiku, said, “2026 will be the year of ‘things AI can’t do’, or more truthfully, things AI can’t do (very well yet).” ‘Ad Age’Creativity Predictions Report. “Expect messy, hand-drawn, roughly textured or irregularly collaged designs, ideas that take pleasure in playing with the boundaries of an ad, and a return to the simple joys of 16mm film, analog recording and ‘leaving the mistakes.'”
Some brands have already joined the resistance. Clothing brand Aerie promised not to use AI in its ads Most Popular Instagram Posts Last year, and Polaroid simply advertised its Flip instant camera with posters that mocked the technology, including one that read, “AI can’t create sand between your toes.”
“We’re such an analog brand that it basically gave us permission: We can own that conversation,” explains Patricia Varela, Polaroid’s creative director. business insider. “That layer of imperfection is what makes us human and beautifully imperfect – something we find important to remind people of.”
Some generative AI tools can now effectively mimic analog and retro medium styles, which will make them even more difficult to distinguish from human-made content.
There are many tools available to provide visually appealing content Very However, polished, an echo chamber is created in which without human creativity everything begins to look the same. It is also easy to spot mistakes in images and videos that strive for such perfection. Every unnatural hallucination and unexplained visual error implies that the project did not involve any human creative professionals to identify or correct them. And advertisers are finding they care less and less about creativity in their campaigns. Recent study by IAB This shows that cost efficiency, time savings and scalability are being prioritized going forward.
With this in mind, I’m urging brands and marketing agencies to remember that a Good Creating an ad by hand doesn’t have to be expensive or challenging. One of the best commercials ever was achieved by filming a bunch of people screaming “vasuuuuup“At each other while drinking Budweiser. It’s something that can only emerge from delightful human quirkiness.
