There’s a statistic that’s been making the rounds for the higher a part of a decade that claims the typical particular person is uncovered to about 10,000 adverts daily. This has all the time sounded a tad suspect, because it quantities to an advert each six seconds of our waking day (it has since been debunked).
However possibly the rationale it’s continued this lengthy is as a result of it actually feels true.
Our feeds are saturated with adverts. The airwaves, TV broadcasts, sports activities sidelines, crew jerseys, and our streamers are filled with them. Now artificial intelligence is threatening to make that 10,000 adverts a day statistic a actuality.
Company Style.ai has made AI-generated adverts for IM8, Popeye’s, and Qatar Airways, in addition to the viral Kalshi spot that aired throughout the NBA Finals. When Sora’s newest model dropped again in October, company founder PJ Ace posted on X, “Manufacturers might want to make an advert each different day to remain related.”
Kill me.
In the meantime, earlier this month, Philip Ho, the founding father of the appropriately named AI video manufacturing firm Absurd, told the TBPN podcast that his firm is getting requested for as many as 1,500 movies a month from single shoppers.
Simply set me on hearth.
All due respect to Ace and Ho, however the model of business tradition they’re promoting seems like an AI-generated fever dream during which we’re all pressured to take away our personal eyeballs with rusty shrimp forks. Even legislation is starting to agree.
Drowning tradition in a sea of sameness isn’t good for our eyeballs, neither is it a very good funding for manufacturers. In the event you watch the adverts Ace’s firm has produced, and examine them to McDonald’s’ recent AI ad (which simply received pulled off the air in Europe), and even Coke’s AI holiday ads, all of them have that very same . . . vibe. The individuals and scenes all seem like utilizing the identical filter. It feels oddly homogenous. Now take that and improve the variety of adverts by tenfold. Pure unfiltered nightmare gas.
If each model is pumping out a brand new AI-generated advert each single day, let’s contemplate what precise differentiation seems to be like. In 2026, manufacturers ought to be discovering new methods to make the most of shortage, anticipation, and fandom communities to that finish. You might name it the much less is extra strategy, however I desire the STFU Model Technique.
The STFU Model Technique isn’t about being quiet, it’s about being extra strategic in each how and while you discuss to your viewers. It’s the pursuit of labor or experiences which can be enthusiastically handed round, versus having AI slop fire-hosed down individuals’s throats each waking second.
Award-winning advert company Johannes Leonardo was top-of-the-line practitioners of the STFU model technique this previous 12 months by way of its work for manufacturers like Adidas and Oscar Mayer. Cofounder and artistic chairman Leo Premutico is a agency believer in the concept differentiation will come within the type of fascinating concepts that actual individuals share with different actual individuals.
“There’s no method that quantity is the reply,” says Premutico. “This complete concept that the extra AI is producing crap that it’s then itself studying from, is simply going to snowball to the purpose the place, what are we even taking a look at? The very last thing we want is extra amount. It must be one thing else.”
The forms of adverts and content material initially being produced en masse by AI are the social media video equal of banner adverts. Efficiency marketing churn baiting us to click on to discover out extra or store now. Experiences for years have pegged banner advert click-through charges at less than 1%.
Now, AI-generated adverts are reportedly performing a lot better than banner adverts ever did. However this isn’t how manufacturers are constructed. Or moderately, it’s not how long-lasting manufacturers are constructed. Manufacturers with a really wholesome higher funnel make the most of these instruments to maintain the decrease funnel wheels turning, however it’s (or ought to be) purely supplemental or supportive of the first model work.
On the very second we’re seeing trade capitulation to AI as a sacrifice to the gods of effectivity (learn: price financial savings as AI substitute people) we’re seeing this regular drumbeat of viewers backlash to AI promoting. Take into consideration that: The very factor individuals routinely say they hate (adverts!) is one thing they don’t need despoiled. The manufacturers and businesses that creatively heed that decision would be the ones to forge essentially the most significant connections with customers.
Pump down the amount
Initially, this isn’t a revolutionary or significantly distinctive viewpoint. Let’s take one fashionable instance. All the streetwear and sneaker financial system is constructed upon shortage. Restricted editions and shock drops, mixed with a really particular viewpoint, elite communication, and style have constructed rabid fanbases. Manufacturers like Supreme, Palace, and Corteiz usually are not churning out AI slop.
London-based Corteiz is arguably the hottest streetwear brand on the planet. Its founder communicates straight with its viewers on social, and its Instagram web page was initially personal. Its pop-ups are sometimes one-day-only, with the placement introduced simply hours earlier than the occasion. Its ethos is reportedly “actual life solely.” Final 12 months in New York, the model invited followers to alternate different manufacturers of denim for a pair of Corteiz, restricted to simply 250 pairs. The results of this restraint? Rabid fandom.
The concentrate on particular moments, and utilizing them as a flywheel of advert materials—capitalizing on user-generated content material round that second, producing further content material from it—works to strengthen a model’s cultural relevance. Take, for instance, racing large scorching canine automobiles in entrance of 100,000 individuals.
Earlier this 12 months, Premutico’s company created the Wienie500 for Oscar Mayer, during which they raced 5 of the model’s famed Wienermobiles in opposition to one another on the Daytona 500. It streamed reside on the Fox Sports activities app, getting 150 million complete views; media protection and social media attracted practically seven billion earned impressions. Oscar Mayer noticed its greatest Memorial Day gross sales raise in years.
“I believe the chance and the way in which to construct a model at the moment is determining how every time you do one thing that captures individuals’s creativeness, consideration, and participation that it’s feeding into one thing greater,” says Premutico. “It’s feeding into that model fairness in order that it’s not a one-off on-line factor after which disappears.”
Anti-slop algorithm
Asking manufacturers to STFU isn’t some Luddite plea. That ship has sailed. The nice ship Sloppipop is right here, and it’s by no means going away—similar to all of the programmatic adverts that comply with you round attempting to promote you the footwear you already purchased a goddamn week in the past. Regardless of how a lot we hate these adverts, the programmatic advert tech corporations are nonetheless rolling in billions.
Wealthy doesn’t imply good. But it surely may imply higher. As a substitute of utilizing this know-how to flood our feeds, manufacturers ought to be utilizing it to refine them.
Model strategist and marketing consultant James Kirkham wrote in his newsletter back in October about cracks in our obedience to the algorithm, {that a} second age of algorithmic tradition could also be upon us, outlined “not by blind submission, however by aware negotiation.” We’ll nonetheless use the machines, however we’ll begin interrogating their style a bit extra as a result of we need to know who’s feeding the feed. He mentioned style is turning into the brand new belief.
“If the primary age of algorithms was about eery prediction, the following will certainly be about permission,” writes Kirkham. “Those that construct instruments that assist us perceive moderately than merely devour, and who restore company, authorship, and taste to our decisions will personal the last decade forward.”
That is in step with what a number of research and tendencies have been telling us: As AI threatens to show up the amount on the variety of adverts we see on-line, more people are seeking ways to avoid the algorithm and have extra distinctive experiences. Research present that 81% of Gen Z wish it was simpler to disconnect from units, and 54% prefer no AI involvement in creative work. In the meantime, 84% of ads reportedly go unnoticed or just aren’t remembered. They’re successfully invisible. And now TikTok is giving users some control over how a lot AI they see of their feeds.
I’ve talked to Yeti CEO Matt Reintjes in regards to the risks of overexposure, and the way his model’s development technique, whereas bold, has all the time favored depth over breadth. Clearly the outside gear model advertises extensively, however its brand-building work—the stuff that will get individuals excited, like its movies and involvement in sports activities—could be very fastidiously and strategically constructed over time.
Again in 2023, he distilled it down to this: “Manufacturers face a number of factors of their journey the place they are often deep and related, however on the expense of development and growth, or they’ll chase development and so they overlook in regards to the depth of connections that they’d already constructed,” mentioned Reintjes. “Over time, you erode model worth, you erode uniqueness, you erode assist and keenness for who you’re. And so we’ve been actually considerate about how we drive breadth, including on extra communities, bringing in additional customers domestically, rising the model internationally, all whereas additionally retaining these deep and related roots all the way in which again to our earliest communities.”
Participation worth
When any model can faux content material, testimonials, or “viral” moments at an infinite scale, the one actual measure of true worth might develop into precise human participation.
Nike is doing it with its soccer work these days. Witness its Manor Palace neighborhood area collab with Palace in London, or the latest stop of its Toma El Juego street soccer tournament event series at Artwork Basel in Miami final week.
However actual human participation may prolong to content material. Simply look at State Farm’s Gamerhood series. Half sport present, half actuality present, that includes gaming creators like Kai Cenat, and its newest season has greater than 27 million views.
Among the best examples of this previous 12 months was how Adidas successfully grew to become the sixth member of Oasis for the band’s huge reunion tour final summer season. The omnipresent merch, retail occasions, and even an advert—created by Johannes Leonardo—that ran at the beginning of each present.
Premutico says that artistic entrepreneurs can now not be asking themselves, “What content material do I make?” however “What neighborhood do I construct?” with the problem of making concepts worthy of client participation.
“We have to create an end result for a model that’s greater and higher than the result that’s going to be assured by the algorithm,” says Premutico. “That’s our central problem as a artistic trade.”
