Google recruited three of advertising’s better-known creative leaders to make AI-generated spots for small businesses, then filmed them doing it. The project, called “The Small Brief,” kicked off in May; the ads and a set of behind-the-scenes mini-documentaries were unveiled August 19. Susan Credle, most recently a global adviser to Omnicom Group and the 2026 Lion of St. Mark winner at Cannes, made a spot for Stonewood Farm in Millbrook, New York. Tiffany Rolfe, chair and global chief creative officer of R/GA, made one for the South Ferry Company on Long Island. Jayanta Jenkins, head of creative studio at Thumbtack, made one for ARCHANGELS, a group that supports caregivers. None of the three had made an AI spot from scratch before.
The tools were Google Flow and Gemini, and the assignment was paid. Google settled on small businesses because larger companies using AI could be read as replacing live-action shoots, while small businesses would not have had the budget for a shoot in the first place.
“What Google really asked for is for myself, Susan and Tiffany to evangelize the technology — to have three individuals who have been in this industry to be somewhat of a lighthouse or beacon to get people to look beyond their concerns about the AI process,” Jenkins said.
Jenkins used Gemini through the strategy phase before writing a script, then generated the bulk of his film over a weekend, roughly eight hours across two days, with at least 300 iterations sitting in his Flow folder. The mirror device his spot turns on came partly from something the model produced unexpectedly, which he called a “happy accident.” Rolfe’s spot leans on historical photographs that AI let her up-res; it also introduced elements she then had to check for historical accuracy, adding a verification layer to the work.
Credle, Rolfe and Jenkins each traced industry animosity toward the technology to the volume of AI slop, video made cheaply without an idea behind it. Rolfe met that pessimism directly when she spoke about the project to students at Shelter Island’s high school. “One kid was going at me, like, ‘Are you making fake ads that you’ll try to sell to us?’ But then another kid called him out and said, ‘You used Gemini in your yearbook writeup, dude,’” she said.
Read more at Ad Age.