A.I. has come for the commercials.
When Coca-Cola released a holiday commercial with visuals generated entirely by artificial intelligence last year, the use of the technology for a 30-second spot seemed novel. It is quickly becoming commonplace.
Nearly 90 percent of marketers who spent more than $1 million on digital video ads last year are using or have plans to use generative A.I. to create video advertisements, according to an industry report released in July. That can mean using tools to streamline production, but also introducing elements like voice-overs. And A.I. has allowed companies to generate hyper-realistic landscapes, salesman avatars and almost any other visual component.
“The number of different elements that one can change in a piece of creative are almost endless,” said David Cohen, chief executive of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, the trade group that published the report. “It’s impossible to do that with humans. It needs a technological assist.”
Many small and medium-size companies are wholeheartedly embracing the change, because the technology can sharply lower production costs. Big tech companies including Meta and TikTok are encouraging the use of A.I. tools as well, introducing their own technologies to make advertisements.
“The amount of content that is being created today makes what was happening 10 years ago look like child’s play,” Mr. Cohen said.
Several years ago, Shuttlerock, a digital creative company, began to experiment with generative A.I. in ways that now seem archaic. The tools available at the time were useful but more time-consuming, and created relatively low-quality images.
Now, the company can quickly incorporate A.I. into its spots. When working with a tissue company for social media promotion, Shuttlerock used an A.I. voice-over. The company needed only to input a script and choose the kind of voice it wanted. Five days later, the agency produced an advertisement with a female narrator who described “three easy steps” for comfort in a highly realistic humanlike voice.
“We started off with imagery, and then moved into voice-over, which is loved by our clients,” said Arron Redmore, chief creative officer at Shuttlerock. “When we’re looking at images, we could be replacing parts of backgrounds, changing the colors and actually having full creative control over it.”
Like the voice-over, other advertisements that Shuttlerock has worked on have used A.I. in nearly imperceptible ways. A real-life image of a beer bottle was placed over generated backgrounds that included a baseball stadium, the beach and a picnic with friends.
For a company that makes salt to put into beer, a series of tailgate scenes were created, complete with fans cheering and enjoying the product. All that client had to supply to Shuttlerock were three product images.
The amount of A.I. used in an advertisement depends on how much a company is comfortable using the technology, Mr. Redmore said. There are ethical concerns about displacing writers, designers and artists. There are also concerns that the ads could fool viewers into thinking something is real when it is actually fake. Mr. Redmore’s company discloses when A.I. is used in an ad with logos or captions.
Last year, ITV, the British television network, began a campaign aimed at providing small businesses with A.I. advertising opportunities. “We are there to help a part of the market that has not been able to get on TV, and create a level playing field,” said Jason Spencer, the network’s director of business development.
ITV has worked with brands that had never promoted their products on television, the first of which had visuals generated entirely by A.I.
In one advertisement, an animated booklet bearing a company’s name, Travel House, takes a vacation where it surfs, lounges and snorkels. In another, for Sheepbridge Interiors, a weary potato ends its day sinking comfortably into a couch.
The animated style, similar to computer-generated imagery, better known as C.G.I., “would have taken a few people a few weeks to make that standard, and cost significantly more,” Mr. Spencer said. With A.I., it took roughly 10 hours from concept to final delivery.
The advertisements, made for a small fraction of the cost and significantly less time, were “performing above the benchmarks for the category with similar brands,” Mr. Spencer added.
Although the A.I. influence is easy to spot in many commercials, its use is sometimes difficult to discern. And consumers have flinched sometimes when they’ve encountered A.I. in advertisements, as some did with Coca-Cola’s holiday commercial.
Generational divides inform how much A.I. will be tolerated, Mr. Cohen said. But, he continued, there is no doubt the technology is changing advertising.
With each industry innovation, “I have found that we always have a tendency to overreact in the short term and underreact in the long term,” Mr. Cohen said, adding, “I don’t think that’s the case here.”
Emmett Lindner is a business reporter for The Times.
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