I must admit, without any embarrassment, that I have a deep appreciation for advertisements. Whether they’re artistic, humorous, quirky, or emotional, TV commercials were my go-to entertainment long before we coined the term “short-form video.” However, like many other creative domains, artificial intelligence is beginning to drain the enjoyment out of it, and this trend is only expected to intensify this year.

Advertisements are like mini-films, posters, and photoshoots, all crafted with one primary goal: to imprint the product they’re promoting in your mind as swiftly as possible. This endeavor demands a high level of creativity and often a significant production budget. While my creative side revels in witnessing the results of such efforts, it also makes ads the perfect playground for testing generative AI technology, as brands strive to expedite and economize their content creation processes. Last year, significant advancements in image and video generator models prompted a surge in their adoption by advertisers.

A study conducted by Marketing Week revealed that by 2025, over half of the 1,000 brand marketers surveyed had incorporated some form of AI into their creative campaigns. Additionally, research from the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) indicated that 90 percent of advertisers were already using or planning to use generative AI for video ads in 2025, with predictions that such technology would feature in 40 percent of all advertisements by 2026.

This shift is why AI-generated ads are becoming more prevalent on television, in magazines, and across social media. Some companies, like Coca-Cola with its holiday ads, openly acknowledge their use of generative AI, while others remain discreet, leaving us skeptical of anything that seems slightly “off.” Sometimes this manifests as people in ads displaying uncanny valley characteristics, such as those featured in campaigns from McDonald’s and DoorDash, where individuals appear overly polished and move awkwardly. In other instances, CGI and visual effects change inconsistently, as seen in an ad for Original Source shower gel. Why does the man’s face keep transforming? Why does it resemble a Memoji?

While spotting AI’s influence in commercials might be obvious to some, most people haven’t yet honed their skills to detect AI in the wild. The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) discovered that humans could only correctly identify AI-generated visuals and audio half the time, which is surprisingly one of the better success rates recorded. Kantar, the market research firm that collaborated on Coca-Cola’s AI-driven holiday campaign in 2024, also found that most of its ad testers failed to recognize the AI generation, despite the evident visual cues and explicit on-screen AI disclosures.

“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.