Why early generative AI ads aren’t working and how creatives will shift to integrate the tech into their work
By Kristina Monllos • January 1, 2025 •
Ivy Liu
Marketers are faithfully obsessed with the shiny new thing when it comes to their brand activations. So it’s no surprise that in year two of having generative AI at their disposal, marketers have rushed to use it in their advertising.
But so far, consumers aren’t as enamored with generative AI created ads as marketers have been. Throughout 2024, the marketers who obviously used generative AI to make their ads (Toys R Us, Under Armour, Coca-Cola) or touted the possibilities of generative AI in their ads (like Google’s Olympics ad they pulled following backlash) had their ads panned by the general public, particularly the creative community.
Despite that, the expectation is that marketers and agency execs will continue to (and likely increase) the use of generative AI in 2025. Marketers are regularly asking questions about how creative agencies are using generative AI and how they can integrate it into the creative process for their brands. Creative agency execs, for their part, believe that generative AI is simply a new tool that they’re going to continue to experiment with in various ways – though most don’t see their experiments going fully generative AI powered, at least not yet.
“We aren’t looking or hoping for AI to replace everything or everyone, just give us access to more intelligence around our ideas and speed our ideas to market,” said John Cornette, chief creative officer at creative shop EP+Co.
As marketers continue to adopt the technology, creatives have to take a hard look at why people have responded so negatively to the few ads they’ve seen so far and learn from that. The problem with early iterations of marketers’ generative AI-infused work wasn’t that they used generative AI, but that the human element seemed to be missing from the creative process, according to eight creatives and agency execs.
“When you’re telling a really great story, you’re being really authentic, you’re making a real connection,” said Eva Neveau, chief creative officer of Omnicom Production. “What we are seeing in the [AI infused] work is that they aren’t authentic and that they don’t have true emotion in them. There isn’t something that takes you into a world that creates a spell. So then you start to be like, ‘wait a minute, you’ve lost the attention of my emotions – and now I’m distracted by the fact that that hand has seven fingers.’”
And those strange errors of the generative AI ads aren’t the only issue marketers and agency execs may encounter. Another, of course, is negative backlash from creative communities and consumers online for using the technology to create robotic and off-putting advertising. And there is the hype cycle in which brands tapping generative AI for their marketing pick up a bit of industry attention. While marketers all want headlines for their work, noted Bill Oberlander, co-founder and creative chairman of full-service agency Oberland, doing so with work that will be, at best, forgotten doesn’t help them in the long run.
“All these AI [ads], to me, are not memorable because they just don’t have the human spirit in them,” said Oberlander. “They don’t have the spark.”
Still, it’s easy to see why the idea of using AI to make ads faster and cheaper at a time when they’re under immense pressure to do more with less has its appeal. “There’s a seductive nature of being able to create things quickly, without going on a shoot, without spending millions of dollars and this, that and the other,” said Paul Malmstrom, founding partner at creative shop Mother in the US. “It is a race around time.”
But when that’s the focus it’s also a “race towards genericism,” said Malmstrom. “As long as we’ve been doing this, our job has always been about distinction. How do you create something that has a distinct voice? How do you create a distinct brand voice? It seems like that’s falling a little bit by the wayside.”
In the chase to make sure they’re on top of the latest trend, marketers can forget that what matters most for their brands isn’t that they’re using the technology that everyone is talking about but making great ads that actually connect with the people they’re trying to reach.
“Brands shouldn’t feel that just by using a technology it makes them ‘innovative,’” said Dave Snyder, is partner and head of design at Siberia. But, in many ways, this train has already left the station. “There will be no shortage of ads and other experiences made using gen AI,” Snyder said. “And if they’re great you’d be none the wiser.”
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