Dear Advertising, Brace For Impact

Don't kill the messenger

I love TV Commercials, I do. I always have. When I was a kid, I didn’t get up and go to the bathroom during commercial breaks; I went during the show so I wouldn’t miss the commercials. What can I say? The heart wants what the heart wants.

The earliest spots I remember are for “Ring Dings,” featuring a guy with a thick Brooklyn accent just eating a Ring Ding and extolling its virtues, and some “Crackerjack” spots starring Jack Gilford.

Most of the spots in the 60s were fairly basic little stories until the late 60s when things got funnier and high concept. Here’s one of my favorites:

I still quote this one whenever my wife puts pasta on the table. “Anthony, Anthony!”

I loved commercials so much that I even ended up in a few as a young Actor. Yeah, I’m the less interesting one on the left:

I was so effective as an Ad pitchman that Coleco went bankrupt a year later.

Yeah, I’m in there, 22 years old. I’m the spastic one standing behind the piano. OK, that’s all of us simultaneously overacting like the cast of “FAME” on Molly, but damn we were committed. If you want to pick me out of the frenzy, I’m the one at the end of the spot throwing his hand up and then to the side like he’s repeatedly hailing a cab, then deciding not to.

Now that I’ve completely revealed myself to what I assume is great respect and homage, I’ll leave this little trip down memory lane and get to the point.

Things in advertising are about to change, and there’s not much to be done about it.

If you followed the news from Cannes Lions this year, you probably noticed that Meta, Google, and YouTube were front and center the entire time, and there’s a reason for that. They made daily announcements, I assume, to see how many agency creatives they could get to climb to the highest roof along the Palais and jump.

With Google’s release of VEO3 just weeks before the show, and the subsequent, I mean within 3 weeks, of an independently produced VEO3 spot that was aired in Primetime during the NBA Finals, the table is being reset.

There have been AI video programs in the marketplace up to this point, but they haven’t looked particularly real, and the difference with VEO3 is that you can prompt the script and output synched video/audio. There is nothing in this spot that is real. It was reportedly executed for $2000. While I’m not sure that’s quite accurate, even if it was ten times that amount, that’s a lot of locations, vehicles, storms, pyro, and TALENT for $20k. The key here is all the production money was saved for the media spend.

From the YouTube perspective, they know that a lot of small businesses use their platform and buy targeted pre-roll spots based on location and demographic. There are a lot of creative, weird spots already making their way onto the platform.

Here’s an AI spot for a local LA practice, Sargon Dental

I think we can agree that this is the future of pre-roll spots for YouTube videos.

Now, though I would prefer not to, let’s talk about Meta and their plans……sigh

Like a truly evil empire, Meta is not content with owning small pieces of the market. They want to own the entire market, and they have a plan to do it. But, what market specifically? They want to own Advertising in its entirety. The creative, the production, and the distribution.

Let’s remember, Facebook and Instagram are monetized by advertising. It is a natural progression for them to look to advertising to monetize their AI investment, and they won’t be the only ones. Google is also monetized through advertising. We can expect them to take a similar approach.

In Cannes, Meta communicated that their “Advantage+ Suite” of advertising tools will become available online in the 4th quarter of 2025 for beta. They expect the final version to become available in 2026. Again, we can expect Google to follow suit with a competing product.

What is a “Suite” of Ad tools? To say they are comprehensive advertising solutions is an understatement Read about them here.

While their announcement positions “Advantage+ Suite” as tools for Small Business and Ad agencies to use a a creative tool, the announcement softens previous statements by CEO Mark Zuckerberg that the AI tools of “Advantage+ Suite” would eliminate the need for creative, targeting and measurement. Pretty much everything Ad agencies do. No backsies Mark, we take you at your word. So do advertising agencies.

WPP, the largest advertising agency holding company in the industry, is doing what it can to muffle a stampede of its clients to Meta. They announced a $318 million investment in AI and a strategic partnership with NVIDIA. The problem here is $318 million is not close to the $60-$65 billion that Meta is putting into AI initiatives in 2025. Seeing as advertising constitutes 98% of their revenue, one can easily imagine the lion share of that money is going in AI Ad tech. That’s on top of the $40 billion they spent in 2024. WPP’s annual revenue is $15 Billion. In “The Untouchables” lingo, WPP is bringing a knife to a gun fight.

The good news, and yes there is good news for now, is that Meta is staying away from traditional TV Commercial production. I’m not sure how long that will last, as Zuckerberg isn’t known for leaving any money on the table, but for now, he’s leaving it to the professionals.

However, if Ad Agency creatives can use AI tools in part to create Ads for TV, we are likely to see the elimination of, for example, running footage for auto commercials. Traditional footage will be replaced by AI elements, embedded in a live action spot. It will be an easier and more cost effective way to create them in AI.

I am a canary in the coal mine.

I’m not an advocate for AI, I’m an advocate for Artists. I’m teaching myself to use AI, because for me it saves time in researching things that I normally slog through Google search for.

It’s time for all of us to get fluent in AI, as much as that is possible in a tech that is moving faster than one can be reasonably expected to keep up with.

My first experience with the Internet was in 1994. At that point, it was just a plethora of chat rooms and forums. Mostly with subjects about the development of the World Wide Web itself and weird kinky sex things. Unless you were committed to one or both of those subjects, it wasn’t all that useful.

But by 1997, it seemed the entire business universe couldn’t live without it. The Web moved from text-based to a graphic interface faster than I ever thought it could. It became ubiquitous. We’re at the same kind of inflection point now.

So, do we all just sell all our stuff and move to the woods? Hell no. There are going to be massive opportunities for Artists and Executives in entertainment and advertising, but, and yes, there’s a but, AI is likely to redefine what you do and how you do it, at least partially. The unions and the industry itself will try to protect themselves and their constituents, but they won’t be able to stop its march forward, simply because between Meta and Google alone, there is one quarter of a trillion dollars propelling the move into AI.

I recently sat down with a Cinematographer who has been doing AI proof of concept films for Apple and Google. He described his role in the process much differently than what a Cinematographer usually does. He shot talent with flat light on a green screen. Then sat with an AI Prompt Engineer to position where the light was coming from, what the movement was, the framing, and the final composition. All of that was entered into the AI interface as a text prompt. In essence, he served as a visual designer. His specific talents were needed to make it all work.

Production Designers are already using AI to design usable worlds to inhabit. Costume Designers are learning to prompt eras of historical dress. Editorial probably will have to become a function of prep as well as post, but you get the picture. AI doesn’t exist on its own. It needs a human to interface with it. It doesn’t matter if you are using Generative AI, translating commands, or Agentic AI that has more of a creative discussion with the Artist. There are humans needed to generate the workflow.

AI may prove to be the best thing Humans have come up with, or the worst thing, or a benign tech that doesn’t control the flow, but is just part of it. As filmmakers, I have a feeling it will be up to us individually how, and if we use it, and to what extent.

On the other hand, maybe everyone is wrong about AI. One of my favorite shows when I was a kid was Walter Cronkite’s “The 21st Century.” He reported on all kinds of futuristic gadgets, and the ways we would live. Here he describes the kitchen of the future. I think he nailed it, especially about the plates.