- Consumers don’t hate AI-generated ads. They hate bad ads that feel artificial, over-polished and emotionally disconnected.
- The real mistake brands make is focusing on AI as the headline or output, instead of using it as a behind-the-scenes creative tool.
- Strong storytelling still matters most; AI should support human creativity, not replace the emotional instinct behind effective advertising.
- AI’s biggest value is improving the advertising process by analysing data, generating concepts faster, creating audience variations and reducing creative bottlenecks.
- AI can help fight ad fatigue by enabling more relevant, timely and diverse campaigns while humans focus on judgement, craft, and strategy.
There’s a story I keep reading in the trades, and I want to analyse it because I don’t think it’s fully accurate. It’s the story about how consumers hate AI-generated ads.
I don’t think consumers hate AI-generated ads. I think consumers hate bad ads generated by AI, and the industry is too focused on using AI the wrong way.
Bad ads perpetuate the issue, and we can do better by focusing on the process rather than the output.
There is some truth in the fact that consumers are becoming suspicious of AI-generated advertising.
They can see the uncanny valley creeping in. The faces are a little too smooth, the copy a little too polished, and the whole thing is a little too clearly AI-generated, which creates distrust.
Where the mistakes lie
Of course, computer animation felt that way at one point, and now there is a universal love for movies like Toy Story. The use of the technology clearly became a tool, rather than the story itself.
In advertising, brands like Coca-Cola have used AI in their ad campaigns, focusing on the output rather than the process, and I think that’s where the mistake lies.
As I keep saying, AI is a tool, and not the story. Nobody writes a press release about how they used Adobe After Effects for creating an ad, so why should the industry care if you used AI?
The story should be about the ad, not the technology used to create it. After all, a great story is what sells, not the tech used to tell it.
It’s about the story, not the tool
The industry, as it tends to do, is over-indexing on transparency and labelling, saying whether AI was involved before consumers figure it out themselves. That’s an over-index in the wrong direction.
It’s not whether consumers trust AI-made ads. It’s whether the ads are any good. The real opportunity AI represents has almost nothing to do with generating the final output.
It has everything to do with what happens before that. My integrity caveat would be if AI is used to represent a holistically false narrative, but even then, the brand is responsible, and not the tech.
What the brand (or agency) does with the technology has to be guided by lawful use and representation, but beyond that, it’s all about the story, and not the tool.
Ad fatigue is real
The opportunity for a process that includes AI sits between insight and execution.
The work of turning data into creative is slow, expensive and dependent on a small number of people who are usually already stretched too thin.
That gap makes it harder to create more ads and also increases expenses.
AI can solve those issues — and, in doing so, address ad fatigue by keeping things fresh.
Ad fatigue is a real issue because consumers see the same ads repeatedly. AI can help not by replacing the creative director or focusing on the work’s output, but by removing the bottleneck between the brief and the execution.
AI can process first-party data and surface the insight that should drive the next campaign in hours rather than weeks.
It can generate 15 variations of a concept so the human team can identify the three worth developing.
Better advertising
It can write the first draft of copy across five audience segments simultaneously, so writers can spend their time on craft and judgement rather than volume.
It can flag when a piece of creative is beginning to fatigue in the market, before you burn the budget trying to squeeze life out of something the audience has already stopped seeing.
None of those efforts show up on screen. Consumers never knows it happened. And that’s exactly the point.
The ads they see as a result of AI are more relevant, timely and varied because the machine handled the throughput problem, while the humans handled the creative problem.
That is not a trust issue. That is just better advertising.
A better story
The brands that will win the next chapter are not the ones that figure out how to label their AI content most transparently.
They are the ones that use AI to get smarter and faster, without ever letting it substitute for the human instinct that makes an ad succeed. AI in the process, not necessarily in the output: that’s the actual unlock.
That’s a much better story than the one we keep telling. And unlike the other one, it has a genuinely good ending.
Don’t you want to see it come out like that?
Cory Treffiletti is chief marketing officer at generative AI-powered product placement platform, Rembrand. He has been a thought leader, executive and business driver in the digital media landscape since 1994. In addition to authoring a weekly column on digital media, advertising and marketing since 2000 for MediaPost‘s Online Spin, Treffiletti has been a successful executive, media expert and/or founding team member for a number of companies, and published a book, Internet Ad Pioneers, in 2012.
