Tag: creative
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GS&P Puts Rich Silverstein’s Creative Critiques on an AI Hotline as He Exits
Rich Silverstein is leaving Goodby Silverstein & Partners after 43 years, and the agency has kept his opinions on call. GPT Rich, a phone hotline built with ElevenLabs and Twilio, judges briefs, design ideas and even typefaces in his voice, drawing on decades of his recorded interviews.
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Ogilvy Assigns AI to Steps in the Creative Process, Not the Finished Ad
Ogilvy’s Carol Reed wants AI working at specific points in the creative process, such as storyboards, workshop notes and compliance reminders, and kept away from the finished campaign. Generative tools can turn out hundreds of variations, she said, but they cannot explain why an ad works, and that judgment stays with people.
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Carl’s Jr. Shot Real Actors on Blue Screen, Then Let AI Build the Colosseum
An armored gladiator faces an unarmed clown in Carl’s Jr.’s new Angus Maximus spot, shot on blue screen with real actors and burgers, then finished with AI. Agency Erich & Kallman says revisions that once took months and millions now happen virtually instantly.
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Kalshi Traded AI Video for 35mm Film Because Everyone Could Make the Same Ad
Kalshi made one of the most attention-grabbing AI-generated ads of 2025. A year later the prediction market has moved to 35mm film, Hollywood cinematographers and an in-house studio, and its creative director says the reason is that generative AI puts every brand at the same skill level.
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Snickers Made a Candy Bar You Paste Into a Chatbot
Snickers made a candy bar for chatbots. Fans paste a digital bar into an AI assistant that has just told them a face tattoo sounds authentically them – the 2010 “You’re Not You When You’re Hungry” premise, rebuilt for a machine that agrees with everything.
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A Craft Distillery Got an Idea a Physical Shoot Would Price Out
A Michigan craft distillery doesn’t have a giant’s budget. Farley Oil and Smoke&Oakum made its bourbon spot with no physical shoot. The director says that didn’t make the ad cheaper. It made an ambitious idea worth pitching to a client this size at all.
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Google Hired Three Creative Chiefs to Make AI Spots — and Filmed Them Doing It
Jayanta Jenkins ran at least 300 iterations of his spot in Google Flow. Tiffany Rolfe had to fact-check the historical details the model invented for hers. Google put three A-list creatives on its AI tools, pointed them at small businesses, and filmed the trial and error for release alongside the ads.
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Brands Will Let AI Rebuild the Shoot. They Stop at the Actors.
Nearly every marketing leader now uses AI in creative work, and 49% of U.S. consumers think AI has made content quality worse. Brands are settling on rules: use AI to rebuild footage they already own, and keep AI-generated actors away from anything a customer sees.
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AI Roundup: Pelé’s Lost Goal, a Referee’s-Eye View, and a Cap That Hides You From Cameras
A goal from 1959 that no camera recorded, rebuilt with a stunt double and Gemini Omni. A World Cup engine that finds you a second team when yours goes out. A cap that spots a phone pointed at you and covers your face. Six campaigns, one dependency.
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Monks’ Co-Founder: The Billable Hour Punishes the Agency That Uses AI Well
Every vendor at Ai4 was selling the same tenfold speedup, which Wesley ter Haar flags as a pervasive issue with AI tooling – when the speed is off the shelf, it is not a moat. The Monks co-founder argues the real constraint is the legacy model: agencies need to stop selling time, because getting faster…
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AI Deepens Three of Four Innovation Bottlenecks. Only the Volume Problem Shrinks.
Give every innovation team the same models and the results diverge anyway. Five marketing academics traced four stages of the pipeline and found generative AI deepens the human bottleneck at three of them; narrowing ideation, flattering fluent pitches, and simulating consumers who behave far too rationally.
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ampm Trades Animatronic Snacks for an AI-Built Smorgasbord
“Too Much Good Stuff” has been ampm’s platform for more than 25 years, previously carried by animatronic snack characters and in-store humor. The new campaign from RPA drops both for a generated hyper-real environment built around photographed products — the chain’s first work using AI-assisted creative tools.
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This Month in AI Activations: Anime Strikers, Digital-Twin Dogs, and Ads That Take Your Order
Ad Age’s latest Top 5 AI activations roundup arrives in a month when Meta shipped Muse Image, the first model from its Superintelligence Labs, and Google pushed lightweight versions of its Omni video and Nano Banana image models to cut marketers’ inference costs — models that increasingly reach advertisers directly inside the ad platforms.
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Canva’s AI Report Says Marketers Are Using It Daily. Consumers Would Like a Label.
Canva’s State of Marketing and AI Report 2026 puts a number on the industry’s current mood: 97% of marketing leaders say they use AI in daily creative work, and 99% plan to increase AI investment this year. The audience, meanwhile, is not exactly clapping. According to the same report, 78% of consumers would rather see…
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Agency Account Teams Are Turning AI Into Client-Specific Utilities
Coming back from maternity leave in 2024, Wendy Owen, (Senior Account Manager Publicis Pro) says the biggest surprise wasn’t staffing changes. It was how casually AI had slipped into day-to-day agency operations, especially in client services, where ambiguity and speed are basically the job description. In this telling, AI’s main impact isn’t “automation” so much…
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Ipsos Tested AI Ads Against Human Ones. Viewers Mostly Shrugged.
Ipsos set up a tidy little test for generative video: take 20 :30 ads from major brands, show them to 3,000 U.S. consumers in a distracted, “real feed” viewing environment via Ipsos Creative|Spark, and see whether AI-made work can hang with the human stuff. Half the ads were human-created originals; the other half were generated…
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Coca-Cola Uses Optical Illusion in OOH Campaign
Coca-Cola’s “You Must Love Coke” OOH push found a way to show up in football stadium ecosystems where wearing (or displaying) red can range from “not advised” to “choose-your-own-adventure.” The trick: billboards and placements that contain *zero* actual red, yet still prompt viewers to “see” Coke’s signature color anyway—because their brains do the work. It’s…
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$1M, 21 AI Spots, and a Ticket to Cannes: Luma’s “Dream Brief” Goes Public
Luma AI’s “Dream Brief” set out to get working creatives hands-on experience with the product. Over two months, the contest pulled nearly 400 AI-made ad submissions from 58 countries and more than 100 agencies, then a panel of heavy hitters narrowed it to 21 spots headed to Cannes Lions. The hook is simple (and very…
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Nano Banana 2: When Product Shots Go From “All-Day Edit” to “Blink and It’s Done
WPP says it’s been testing Google’s newest Generative Media model, Nano Banana 2, through early access—alongside Unilever and The Coca-Cola Company. The headline result isn’t “cool AI stuff,” it’s practical: the team reports better reasoning and grounding, which translated into factually accurate outputs and high-fidelity visuals (read: fewer weird brand-label hallucinations and less time fixing…
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“Made by Humans” Becomes the New Flex
As AI-made “slop” clogs feeds, some brands are trying a different kind of label: not “made with AI,” but “not made with AI.” The pitch is simple—if consumers are increasingly suspicious of what they’re seeing, brands want to get in front of that skepticism by spelling out when people, images, and videos are real. Aerie…
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Volkswagen’s New Art Director: An AI That Checks the Headlights (and the License Plate)
Volkswagen Group (10 brands, 6.6M vehicles delivered in the first nine months of 2025) partnered with the AWS Generative AI Innovation Center to tackle a very grown-up marketing problem: making thousands of brand-correct images without paying six figures for every photo shoot or waiting weeks for post-production and approvals. The output is an end-to-end system…
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Publicis Buys a Creative Crystal Ball (AdgeAI Joins the Fold)
Publicis Groupe just added another item to its AI shopping cart, acquiring Israel-based AdgeAI for an undisclosed price—funded from the $970 million deal budget it’s set aside for 2026. AdgeAI is a predictive creative analytics platform that uses machine learning to forecast which parts of an ad (video, images, text, GIFs) are most likely to…
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Transforming Retail: Wayfair’s AI-Driven Shopping Experience
Wayfair’s CMO Paul Toms is revolutionizing the customer journey through AI, introducing an AI-powered “Discover” tab that simplifies product discovery for users. With over 30 million items, this feature aims to alleviate choice paralysis and seamlessly convert inspiration into purchases. Collaborating with CTO Fiona Tan, Toms is rethinking cross-channel marketing metrics, utilizing first-party data to…
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How Diageo is using AI to halve the price of 1,000 ad impressions
The drinks conglomerate has been embedding artificial intelligence into its marketing functions after finding efficiencies, with CreativeX analyzing and optimizing creative for Diageo every three minutes. Full story at The Drum