AI was supposed to reinvent advertising. To make it intimate. Tailored. A whisper in your ear, not a billboard in your face.
Instead, most AI ads today feel like generic upscale animation slick, polished, but soulless. They don’t feel personal. They feel mass-produced and very similar to one another.
The illusion of personalization
Agencies love to say “personalization at scale.” What we’re really seeing is templating at scale. A character model reused, a background swapped, a few lines of text rotated. The result: ads that look identical across brands, categories, and countries. I can’t help wondering: are they actually selling the product, or just selling the illusion of innovation?
It’s creative déjà vu.
– Nearly 90% of advertisers are already using AI to make video ads (IAB, 2025).
– Yet consumers aren’t fooled: NielsenIQ found many describe AI ads as “boring,” “annoying,” and “confusing” (Nielsen/OKO One, 2024).
If the promise was intimacy, the delivery feels like an overproduced screensaver.
The data proves what’s missing
When AI is used for real personalization, the results are different:
– MIT researchers (2025) found personalized AI video ads boosted engagement by 6–9 percentage points, while cutting production costs by 90% (MIT IDE, 2025).
– Headway, an edtech startup, reported a 40% ROI increase after leaning into AI creative—but only because they combined speed with true audience tailoring (Business Insider, 2024).
The distinction is clear: personalized AI works. Generic AI doesn’t.
Template fatigue is the new banner blindness
We’ve replaced stock photography with stock animation. Banner blindness with template blindness. Ads that were supposed to see you instead blur into the feed.
And here’s the tragedy: the tech could do more. AI can adapt mood, context, culture, even language nuance. But right now, most agencies are chasing speed over meaning volume over resonance.
The fork in the road
The industry faces a choice:
– Keep churning out glossy, generic animations that look expensive but feel empty.
– Or use AI as a scalpel cutting deeper into personalization, creating work that actually feels alive to the person watching.
Because if AI is just helping us produce better-looking wallpaper, then it’s not innovation. It’s stagnation with better rendering.