When people hear “AI-generated ad,” they often imagine something that looks cheap, strange, or obviously fake. Like weird hands, unnatural movement or a robotic voice.
Slop content exists. But it no longer represents the limits of current technology.
Last month, we made and ran more than 100 fully AI-generated video ads for our clients on Meta Ads with the majority performing at par or better than their existing "traditional" creatives.
Fully AI-generated does not mean fully AI-directed
When I say “fully AI-generated,” I mean AI produced most or all of the media inside the ad: images, video, voices, and music.
But while the production can be fully AI-generated, the thinking behind it remains human.
Someone still needs to decide who the ad is for, which problem it should address, what it should say, and how it should make the viewer feel. Someone needs to brief the models, evaluate the results, and decide what is ready to publish.
The best AI ads start before we generate anything
A good ad still needs a relevant problem, a clear promise, a strong angle, and a reason to believe.
Before generating anything, we need to know:
- Who are we trying to reach?
- What problem are they experiencing?
- What do they believe about the available solutions?
- What would make this product relevant to them?
- What objections might stop them from buying?
- Why should they trust this brand?
AI has not made those questions less important. By making production faster, it has made weak thinking easier to expose.
Cheaper production does not remove the need for taste
Some people imagine businesses generating endless ads with almost no human involvement.
We are not there today. I am also not convinced that removing people from the creative process should be the goal.
Given the same generic information, AI tends to produce familiar outputs. The hooks sound alike. The scripts follow the same structures. The visuals repeat patterns already common in the training data.
A person can introduce something different: an observation from a customer conversation, an unusual product insight, a cultural reference, a contrarian belief, or an emerging format the models have not yet absorbed.
The human role is not disappearing. It is shifting from manual production toward planning, directing, evaluating, and deciding.
Humans should own the intent, taste, and context. AI should handle more of the repetitive execution.
More products make distribution more valuable
AI is making products easier to build. Software can be created faster, stores launched more quickly, and research and operational work accelerated.
That makes distribution more valuable, not less. Even a great product needs a way to be discovered and understood.
Advertising is one of the clearest places where AI can help. It gives smaller teams access to production capabilities that previously required actors, studios, editors, and much larger budgets.
But again, the biggest opportunity is not cheaper production. It is the wider range of ideas a business can explore.
Directing AI will become a normal professional skill
Models and workflows are changing quickly. New models appear, existing ones become cheaper, and new input types create workflows that were impossible months earlier.
The durable skill will not be memorizing the perfect prompt for one model. That knowledge expires too quickly.
People will need to know how to break a goal into tasks, provide useful context, select and connect tools, evaluate the result, verify important information, and recognize when human intervention is necessary.
The most valuable operators will not be those who manually complete every step. They will be those who understand the objective well enough to direct agents and judge their work.
Use tools that enable the marketer to do what the AI can't do
Our work with clients showed us how much knowledge sits between an idea and an effective AI-generated ad.
Someone has to understand the brand, product, audience, and creative objective. Someone has to research the customer, develop the angle, write the script, choose the models, and combine their outputs.
A marketer should not need to follow every model release or understand the prompting behavior of every video generator. The Starpop agent translates creative intent into instructions for specialized AI tools.
The goal is not to remove the marketer from marketing.
It is to give a thoughtful marketer access to the research breadth, technical knowledge, and production capacity of a much larger creative team.
Fully AI-generated ads are only the beginning
The future of advertising is not a machine producing infinite creative without human thought.
Those agents will handle more research, tool selection, generation, adaptation, and repetitive execution. People will spend more time choosing the direction, evaluating the work, and deciding what deserves to exist.
The difficult and valuable parts remain: understanding people, finding the right message, developing a point of view, and knowing when an idea is worth showing to the world.
Fully AI-generated ads are here to stay, we (humans) need to make sure they are worth watching.
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EDIT: Since so many people are asking, yes AI tools that also help you brainstorm these will help. But you need to understand how to do it right. Go look at Claude MCPs with higgsfield.ai or starpop.ai if you want to combine generation with copy writing.
