We’ve Heard from the Experts on AI Ads, but What About the Audiences?

Last year was the year generative AI in ads went from being the next big thing to just the big thing. When brands are using a technology to make ads as commercially vital as the annual Coke Christmas campaign, you know it’s arrived.

Of course there’ll be a lot of buzz and chat at Cannes about what it all means, particularly around how best to integrate AI and human creativity, and what the longer-term risks and opportunities will be. It won’t all make for comfortable conversations. The last great ad revolution, the shift from traditional to digital media, brought with it new issues with spam and fraud but also - as Orlando Wood’s explored in his landmark books Lemon and Look Out - a movement in creative work towards more immediate, performance-driven ads which has arguably made brand building tougher.

Used badly, generative AI could accelerate that shift, turning ads into the generic products of an averaging machine. Used well, AI could help reverse it. The tools offer visual and storytelling tools way beyond the previous budgets of smaller brands and an opportunity to bring commercial ideas to life more quickly and easily than ever before.

But one perspective has often been left out of the discussion: the audience. Ad experts, critics, technologists and creatives have weighed in but at System1 we’ve known for a long time that the industry and the public don’t always agree on what makes a good ad. And in the end, it’s the public’s response that counts. Positive emotional response, rapid brand recognition and an intense reaction underpin the effectiveness of AI ads as much as any other.

So there are two big questions we have to answer about AI ads. Do people like them as much as the human kind? And is knowing an ad was done with AI a selling point or a hindrance?

Every ad we test gets a Star Rating between 1.0 and 5.9-Stars, predicting the ad’s potential for long-term business impact, based on the positive emotional response people have to it. The first AI-generated ads we tested, a few years ago, were already scoring 2-Stars, in line with the overall average. Given how primitive some of the tech was, that was already a surprisingly solid result.

By the time Coke put out their AI Christmas Trucks ad last year, AI generated imagery was at a level where the resulting ad could get the maximum 5.9-Stars, and none of our test viewers spontaneously brought up AI in their reactions. Of course, that’s the Christmas Trucks ad, an audience favourite every single year. The results are as much a testament to 30 years of creative consistency as to AI wizardry.

But Volvo Saudi Arabia’s AI-driven ‘Come Back Stronger’ also got 5-Stars, and even Google’s much-criticised ‘Dear Sydney’ (where a Dad gets Gemini to draft a fan letter for his daughter) scored strongly with the public. In other words, generative AI is already good enough to produce ads which get the top scores in creative testing.

What we don’t know is how purely AI-generated these ads are, and how much human ideas, prompts and editing play a role. The actual processes brands and agencies are using are invisible to the public. Almost certainly, there’s already plenty of AI in ads we imagine are all-human, and more human input than you’d guess in ads whose PR makes a big thing of AI.

If AI enables us to generate content at ten times the speed and scale, as many claim, we must remember that the audience remains unchanged. This makes the quality of what you create more critical than ever. Investing in a deep understanding of your customer, the power of a strong creative idea, and an execution that is truly impossible to ignore will be even more valuable in the future.

As far as the public’s concerned, it really doesn’t matter. They judge the meal, not the recipe, and AI has already served up top-scoring ads. AI ads may not quite be the norm yet but the window of earning publicity just because you’ve used generative tools is closing fast, and the tools are good enough that people won’t be able to tell anyway.

One thing I would put money on as we all come to terms with AI: creative consistency and brand are going to matter more than ever. Brands which have invested in recognisable assets, from characters through logos to sounds, will be at a double advantage. They’ll stand out more as AI raises the visual bar. And - like the Coke Trucks - they’ll find it much easier to train and use AI to make ads people love. Because whoever or whatever made an ad, it’s the humans who see it that matter.