AI generated ads are winning credibility
Amaysim, Coca-Cola, FILA, Anthropic, Google. The list of brands shipping fully or primarily AI generated work is growing, and the early audience reaction is sharper than the Super Bowl 2026 numbers suggested.
Mariano De Vitto · May 2026
In February, Svedka aired Shake Your Bots Off during Super Bowl LX and earned a brand match score of 7 percent against an industry norm of 63. The quick read was easy · AI generated ads do not work. That read was wrong. What did not work was the AI-as-novelty register. The work that shipped since then tells a different story.
Amaysim, Coca-Cola, FILA, BMW · the new wave
Australian telco Amaysim launched The Escape Story, its first fully AI generated TV commercial, made by two people in two weeks using Adobe Firefly for image generation and Runway for motion. The creative never announced itself as AI. It read like a competent telco ad with a sharper concept than the category typically produces. Audience response was disproportionately positive for a challenger brand with a small budget.
Coca-Cola scaled its Create Real Magic v2 idea into a 2026 production loop where individual SKUs ship with subtly different labels generated on-demand. It did not need to market itself as AI work. It just read as Coke caring about design.
BMW projected AI generated artworks onto its luxury cars at major auto shows in lieu of running a TVC. FILA with Indian streetwear label Almost Gods produced a fully AI generated ad that reads as fashion editorial first and tech demo second. Google's Nano Banana Pro Super Bowl spot, a mother and son imagining their new home with AI, landed warmly precisely because the tool did not appear in the foreground.
The pattern is consistent
AI generated ads succeed when the AI is invisible in the work and only visible in the production economics. The brands that win the next year will be the ones that treat AI as a production cost saver and a creative speed up, not as a story.
What to do this quarter
For marketing organizations, the strategic to-do is uncomfortable but clear. Audit the brand's last twelve months of creative output. Identify the three deliverables that consumed the most production days. Ask whether each one could have shipped at higher quality if AI tooling owned the routine work and the creative team owned the brief and the final call. The answer is almost always yes for at least one of the three. That is where the next quarter's pilot lives.
Cannes Lions added an AI Craft subcategory for the 2026 festival, with the requirement that eligible work show the core concept, execution or impact would not have been possible without AI. That marks the end of the experimental phase. Awards bodies now grade AI generated work as work, not as novelty.
This week's signal: AI generated ads are starting to win because they are good ads. Treat AI as a production tool, not a story.
The Signal Brief · Mariano De Vitto — Head of Marketing, Barcelona