Get ready for the AI ad-pocalypse

I’ll confess, with no shame whatsoever, that I really love ads. Artsy ones, funny ones, weird ones, emotional ones — TV commercials were my childhood TikTok before any of us were using terms like “short-form video.” But like most creative things in my life, AI is sucking the joy out of it. And it’s only going to suck harder this year.

Ads are mini-movies, posters, illustrations, and photoshoots with an underlying purpose: to burn whatever product they’re flogging into your brain as quickly as possible. It 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 generative 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 study, more than half of 1,000 polled brand marketers used some variant of AI in their creative campaigns in 2025. Another study by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) found that 90 percent of advertisers were using, or planning to use, generative AI for video ads in 2025, and projected that such tools would be used in 40 percent of all ads by 2026.

That’s why we’re increasingly seeing AI ads on TV, in magazines, and across social media. Some are upfront about using generative AI, such as Coca-Cola’s sloppy holiday ads, but many aren’t — leaving us to be suspicious of everything we see that appears slightly “off.” Sometimes, that can be humans who give off uncanny valley vibes, like the ads we’ve seen from McDonalds and DoorDash where the people look too polished and move in unnatural ways. Or perhaps CGI and visual effects that morph inconsistently in ways that would be weird for a VFX artist to do intentionally, like this ad for Original Source shower gel. Why does that man’s face keep changing? Why does it keep trying to turn him into a Memoji?

But while generation in commercials might seem obvious to some, clocking AI in the wild isn’t something most humans are good at yet. The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) found that humans could only accurately identify AI-generated images, video, and audio 50 percent of the time, and that’s one of the higher success rates we’ve seen. Kantar, the market research company that helped to develop Coca-Cola’s AI holiday campaign in 2024, also found that most of its ad testers couldn’t tell it was AI-generated, despite the tell-tale visuals and clear on-screen AI disclosure.

“The people that matter most – Coca-Cola’s target audience – still enjoy it, feel good when they see it, and love the brand for it,” Kantar managing director Dom Boyd told Campaign. “Lots. In fact, Kantar’s [ad testing] shows that the vast majority of people didn’t notice the ad was AI-generated (we asked), and the execution is one of the highest-performing this year for short-term sales potential.”

Audience reactions to AI ads have been mixed, however. In a November 2025 Kantar study, consumers were discouraged by ads that featured obvious AI signals like “distracting or unnatural visuals,” but responded well to ads that used AI well enough to go largely undetected. The same study also found that people have stronger emotional reactions to AI-generated ads compared to those made without it — but the reactions in question were typically negative.

We see much of that negativity around obvious AI advertisements across forums and in the comments on social media platforms. There’s even an r/AiSlopAds subreddit community dedicated to publicly shaming examples of AI ads. There are several commonly mentioned reasons for this sentiment, including ethical and environmental concerns around generative AI, seeing its supposed cost-cutting and efficiency benefits as something that cheapens branding, and just thinking it looks unappealing.

Money (duh) is the obvious reason why more brands are increasingly ready to risk that negativity to explore generative AI. Sure, AI ads for prediction market platform Kalshi are scorned by Reddit users, but a particularly bonkers and confusing example that aired during a primetime 2025 NBA finals slot only cost $2,000 to make. It was created in just two days by one 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 does indicate people found it memorable, even if it’s for the wrong reasons.

A memorable ad can become a company’s legacy. The famous “Just Do It” (1988) Nike slogan was created for the fitness company’s first major television campaign by Wieden and Kennedy, with relatable commercials that featured everyday people doing their workouts. UK readers may also recall the 1999 Guinness “Surfer” commercial (directed by Jonathan Glazer with the ABM BBDO ad agency), an internationally acclaimed masterpiece of advertising that took nine days to film in Hawaii, using pioneering visual effects to merge live-action, heavy-water surfing with CGI horses.

The production budgets for commercials aren’t frequently disclosed, but when made traditionally, they can cost a pretty penny. The media spend for Old Spice’s “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” is estimated to be $10 million, which was smaller than many major ad campaigns that also aired in 2010. There’s also the iconic “1984” commercial 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 for being crap. Coca-Cola says that its AI holiday commercials are successful, but they just replicated its iconic red truck campaign, something that already had decades of positive nostalgia through genuine human creativity and production efforts.

But while creating a successful campaign entirely through generative AI may be challenging now, it will become easier as tools and models continue to improve. The tech and media world is banking on it now that major brands like Nestlé, Mondelez, and Coca-Cola have already set a precedent. Google and Microsoft have produced ads using their own generative AI models, and Amazon is giving sellers tools to fill its site with AI ads. Meta is expected to roll out 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.

Even the marketers behind beloved, iconic ads are on board. ABM BBDO has launched its own AI platform, and Wieden and Kennedy is openly using AI in its production pipelines. “I think AI is an incredibly powerful tool, but it’s still a tool,” Wieden and Kennedy CEO Neal Arthur said in a LinkedIn News interview. “I think it allows us to scale more efficiently, but I don’t spend any time worrying about whether AI is going to take over for us as humans.”

Generative AI usage is expected to be so pervasive in advertising this year that early trends are already anticipating a resistance movement, one that aims to build loyalty with consumers who are seeking to avoid synthetic content.

“2026 will be the year of ‘things AI can’t do,’ or more truthfully, things AI can’t do (very well yet),” Thom Glover, founder of creative agency American Haiku, said in AdAge’s creativity predictions report. “Expect messy, hand-drawn, roughly textured or erratically collaged design, ideas that take pleasure in playing with the boundaries of what an ad is, and the return to the simple pleasures of 16mm film, analog recording, and ‘leaving in the mistakes.’”

Some brands have already joined this resistance. Aerie’s promise not to use AI in its ads was the clothing brand’s most popular Instagram post last year, and Polaroid advertised its Flip instant camera with bus posters that poked fun at the technology, one reading “AI can’t generate sand between your toes.”

“We are such an analog brand that basically gave us the permission: We can own that conversation,” Polaroid’s creative director Patricia Varella told Business Insider. “That layer of imperfection that makes us human and beautifully imperfect — something we think is important to remind people.”

Some generative AI tools can now mimic analog and retro medium styles rather effectively, which will make distinguishing them from human-made content even harder.

Many tools are catered to delivering content that looks too polished, however, creating an echo chamber in which everything starts to look the same without human-creativity to differentiate it. It’s also easier to spot mistakes in images and videos that strive for such perfection. Every unnatural hallucination and unexplained visual error implies that the project didn’t include any human creative professionals to identify or correct them. And advertisers are finding that they care less and less about creativity in their campaigns, with a recent study from IAB showing that cost efficiency, time savings, and scalability are being prioritized going forward.

With that in mind, I’m begging brands and marketing agencies to remember that a good ad doesn’t need to be expensive or challenging to produce by hand. One of the best commercials of all time was achieved by filming a bunch of dude yelling “WASSUUUUUP” at each other while drinking a Budweiser. That’s something that can only be manifested by delightful human weirdness.