We used to have a saying at the first agency I worked for: “Money flows to new.”
Back then, “new” meant things like QR codes, mobile video and social media. Then, tech really took off and programmatic advertising, augmented reality and data-driven insights became the new “new.”
AI was also a thing, but it wasn’t as buzzy as data or rich media. Today, if you dare say anything other than that two-letter word when describing your company or tech, you may as well not even try.
AI is everywhere, and the pressure and convenience of using it are hard to resist.
But while we now have plenty of evidence that AI can be an incredibly useful tool, proof is also piling up that it erodes our creativity. And while the short-term gains from using AI are real, we have to question what we’re losing in the long run.
We’re already dependent on AI for creative
It’s too late to turn back the clock on generative AI adoption for ad creative. The technology is already deeply embedded in the work.
According to the IAB, 83% of ad executives say their company has deployed AI in the creative process, up from 60% in 2024.
Generative AI is also becoming central to video advertising, with 86% of buyers using or planning to use it to build video ad creative. And the shuttering of OpenAI’s Sora video-generation tool won’t slow down this momentum, since a host of other consumer-facing and advertising-specific AI video platforms are already crowding the market.
Some AI applications are actually great for idea generation. A March 2025 study described AI as a “catalyst for idea exploration,” a tool that helps marketers experiment faster and visualize concepts more easily.
But scale and speed are not the same thing as originality.
The rise of generative tools has made it easy to skip the messy, exciting part of brainstorming. Instead of spending time on original ideas, we turn to AI to polish or expand something we’ve already seen. It feels efficient, but the tradeoff is just a lot of parity.
A recent Wharton study found that, while generative AI can help teams produce strong ideas quickly, it often narrows the diversity of those ideas. Because participants tend to use similar prompts, the results converge, leading to fewer distinct perspectives. The authors stress that true brainstorming value comes from variety, not repetition, and they caution that fluency should not be mistaken for originality.
Meanwhile, a meta-analysis of 28 studies on generative AI from May 2025 found that teams working with AI performed better than those without it, but those working without AI often produced more diverse ideas.
When every campaign uses the same prompts, tone and voice, the work starts to blur together. Brands lose the spark that makes them stand out, and audiences tune out.
The repercussions of AI overreliance
That dynamic is already playing out in the real world.
Coca-Cola’s recent AI-driven holiday campaigns felt flat and artificial to many viewers. Though the goal was nostalgia, the ads leaned too heavily on familiar imagery and patterns and lacked nuance and originality. Instead of feeling new, they felt like a remix of what had already been done before.
McDonald’s faced an even sharper backlash with a recent AI-generated holiday ad in the Netherlands. The campaign was criticized online for feeling unsettling, emotionally flat and visually off, enough so that McDonald’s ultimately pulled it. The problem was not simply that AI was used, but also that audiences could immediately feel what was missing: human nuance, warmth and originality.
In both cases, the issue was not necessarily the use of AI itself, but the overreliance on it to carry the creative. The final product may have been efficient to produce, but it lacked the distinct perspective that audiences expect from brands at that level.
Recent industry research suggests marketers may also be overestimating how well this type of creative is landing. In a January 2026 report, the IAB found that 82% of ad executives believed Gen Z and millennial consumers felt positive about AI-generated ads, while only 45% of consumers said they actually did.
The report also warned that using AI primarily for cost efficiency could undermine quality. Audiences can often sense when creative has been optimized for speed and savings rather than originality.
That parity is not just a creative issue but also a business issue. Advertisers depend on originality to break through. If AI-generated campaigns become the norm, performance will drop because consumers stop noticing what feels familiar. We may get faster output but weaker engagement.
In a world of infinite content, creativity is still the one thing that earns attention.
“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.
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