Generative AI has made its way into the advertising world, but early attempts have fallen flat with consumers. Marketers rushed to use the technology in their campaigns throughout 2024, but the public, especially the creative community, panned their efforts. Despite the negative response, marketers and agency executives are expected to continue and even increase their use of generative AI in 2025.
They regularly ask creative agencies how they are using the technology and how it can be integrated into their brands’ creative process. Creative agency executives see generative AI as a new tool to experiment with, but most don’t envision their experiments going fully AI-powered just yet. John Cornette, chief creative officer at EP+Co, said, “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.”
As marketers adopt the technology, creatives must examine why people have responded so negatively to the few ads they’ve seen so far and learn from that.
The problem with early generative AI-infused work wasn’t the use of the technology itself, but the lack of a human element in the creative process, according to eight creatives and agency executives. Eva Neveau, chief creative officer of Omnicom Production, said, “When you’re telling a really great story, you’re being really authentic, you’re making a real connection.
Generative AI ads lack authenticity
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.”
Marketers and agency executives may also face negative backlash from creative communities and consumers online for using the technology to create robotic and off-putting advertising. Bill Oberlander, co-founder and creative chairman of Oberland, noted that while marketers want headlines for their work, doing so with work that will be forgotten doesn’t help them in the long run. The appeal of using AI to make ads faster and cheaper is easy to understand, but focusing solely on that can lead to a “race towards genericism,” according to Paul Malmstrom, founding partner at Mother in the US.
He said, “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.”
Marketers must remember that what matters most for their brands is making great ads that connect with their target audience, not just using the latest technology. Dave Snyder, partner and head of design at Siberia, said, “Brands shouldn’t feel that just by using a technology it makes them ‘innovative.'”
As the use of generative AI in advertising continues to grow, it will be up to marketers and creatives to find the right balance between leveraging the technology and maintaining the human touch that makes ads truly memorable and effective.
