SSubida Skills

Esc to close · results from all notes, skills and people

Marketing›Ad creative

AI-generated ad creative — where Barry Hott uses it and where the lines are

How Barry Hott used Veo 3 / Kling in 2025 — AI hooks followed by real-human ads, B-roll and stock-footage replacement, animating existing product stills, AI "pre-shoots" before expensive shoots, prompting exact pacing and inflection — the compliance line (no AI testimonials about physical experience), why the bar for "pretty ads" dropped to ~zero, his worry about AI static-image glut, and Savannah Sanchez's no-AI counterpoint.

Updated 2026-10-24·2 sources·ad-creativeaiveougccomplianceproduction-cost

AI-generated ad creative

TL;DR

  • Barry’s main 2025 use: AI-generated hooks followed by real human footage. He ran a few fully AI ads, some at scale, but full end-to-end AI ads were not his goal.12
  • Compliance line: no AI “people” describing a physical experience of the product, which is a fake testimonial (illegal the same way paying a creator to make false claims is). AI can tell a story or state a problem.3
  • Cheapest wins: animate existing product/studio stills (push-ins, product turns), generate B-roll you wish you had, and replace stock footage, which he says now has ~zero value to him.45
  • Use AI to pre-shoot: prompt the exact pacing, inflection and setting of a hook (“say it faster”, “more incredulous”), test it, then reshoot winners with a real creator.67
  • Goal: lower cost per ad → more ads → more chances to win.8

Details

Two kinds of AI content. (1) AI creative that doesn’t look AI-made. (2) Openly AI content people enjoy because it is AI (skydiving gorillas, cavemen). There is an audience for the second, but it may only last while it’s novel.9 Barry’s rule stays the same: make ads in the style of what consumers are consuming.10

Who notices. He believes ~85% of people won’t notice or care when it’s done well. In his view the only audience reliably put off by realistic AI ads is people in film and creative work.11

Tools (mid-2025). Google Veo (Veo 3 made “passable” talking UGC clips days after launch) and Kling. He recommends every brand at least play with them to see what’s possible.125

Pretty ads get cheap. A shoot an agency would price at $1K–$50K can now cost “effectively 10 cents”. That threatens high-end brands and production agencies. Barry still doesn’t expect the broad ~80–85% of consumers to drift toward polished content: someone FaceTiming you from the street still beats an obvious sell.1314

The static-image concern. AI makes image ads so easy that the supply of AI statics far outstrips how much image content people consume organically. He wonders whether audiences will tune out image ads altogether.15

Brand trust and performance marketing. If you won’t, a smaller competitor will. He has measured large brand lift from highly relevant performance ads in brand-lift tests, and argues volume-driven AI testing feeds brand rather than cheapening it.1617

Disagreements / caveats

  • Savannah Sanchez’s agency uses no AI, only its 40 in-house creators. When AppLovin pulled top performers for her brands, nearly all were strictly UGC-style.18 An AppLovin rep on the same call suggested AI video as a stop-gap to iterate on winning concepts.19
  • Barry flags the environmental cost (energy, water; Meta’s 20-year nuclear deal) as an unsolved problem.20
  • This is an unedited mid-2025 conversation with Tina Donati. Tools and platform rules (e.g. YouTube demonetising AI content, Meta AI labels) change fast, so re-check.21

See also

Footnotes

  1. AI Ads: No Going Back @ 03:58 — Barry Hott ↩

  2. AI Ads: No Going Back @ 33:33 — Barry Hott ↩

  3. AI Ads: No Going Back @ 04:49 — Barry Hott ↩

  4. AI Ads: No Going Back @ 17:37 — Barry Hott ↩

  5. AI Ads: No Going Back @ 33:33 — Barry Hott ↩ ↩2

  6. AI Ads: No Going Back @ 22:23 — Barry Hott ↩

  7. AI Ads: No Going Back @ 24:30 — Barry Hott ↩

  8. AI Ads: No Going Back @ 19:13 — Barry Hott ↩

  9. AI Ads: No Going Back @ 05:39 — Barry Hott ↩

  10. AI Ads: No Going Back @ 07:17 — Barry Hott ↩

  11. AI Ads: No Going Back @ 29:33 — Barry Hott ↩

  12. AI Ads: No Going Back @ 01:53 — Barry Hott ↩

  13. AI Ads: No Going Back @ 25:36 — Barry Hott ↩

  14. AI Ads: No Going Back @ 27:11 — Barry Hott ↩

  15. AI Ads: No Going Back @ 31:55 — Barry Hott ↩

  16. AI Ads: No Going Back @ 16:02 — Barry Hott ↩

  17. AI Ads: No Going Back @ 20:46 — Barry Hott ↩

  18. AppLovin Ad Creative Secrets from The Top eCommerce Advertisers @ 44:58 — Savannah Sanchez ↩

  19. AppLovin Ad Creative Secrets from The Top eCommerce Advertisers @ 43:37 — AppLovin rep (Jonathan) ↩

  20. AI Ads: No Going Back @ 12:45 — Barry Hott ↩

  21. AI Ads: No Going Back @ 01:53 — Barry Hott ↩