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A cartoon image of Kristina Monllos created by Morning Brew

Kristina Monllos

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A brand puts out a new campaign with imagery that looks like it could be AI-generated, eagle-eyed observers point out that said campaign is likely AI-generated, backlash ensues, the brand (sometimes) makes a vague statement of acknowledgement, and everyone moves on. Rinse and repeat.

That cycle has come for big-name brands like 

 in recent weeks. The use of (or, at least, accusations of the use of) AI-generated imagery in ads by major brands may signal a shift in the marketing landscape—namely that, slowly but surely, marketers seem to be getting more comfortable using 

, regardless of whether consumers are comfortable seeing it. (The brands did not immediately respond to Marketing Brew’s requests for comment.)

“You’re already seeing things that used to be a photo shoot, even if it’s just stock imagery, you’re seeing that now be replaced by AI imagery,” Jon Weidman, SVP of development and head of brand content at production studio Wavelength, said. “[Your feed is] filling up with quote, unquote, slop, a volume of content that wouldn’t be possible without these tools. We see it. We’re watching it. I don’t see a world in which the cat goes back in that bag.”

Weidman isn’t alone in the assessment that the steady drip of AI imagery from brands will likely continue and increase.

 from the Interactive Advertising Bureau, 90% of the digital ad buyers surveyed either are planning to use or are currently using generative AI to make digital video ads.

“Every couple months, we have conversations with brands, ‘What do you think about using this technology? Are we? Do we? Does this help? Does it add value? Does it remove friction or cost or anything like that? Are there any risks involved?’” Jason Carmel, global creative data lead at VML, told Marketing Brew.

But even as marketers ask those questions and consider whether or not to use AI-generated imagery in ads, they “don’t want to be in the news because they’re using AI imagery,” Carmel said. “There are a million good ways to use this technology, and we’re exploring all of them, and our brands that we represent are exploring them as well.”

The reasons for that exploration vary. For some marketers, the decision to use AI-generated imagery for an ad campaign is about cost.

“It’s all about the budget,” Abigail Olivas, head of strategy at No Single Individual, a shop that provides talent assistance to agencies and brands, said. At the same time, she added that a sentiment shift helps as “we’re in a cultural swing of, the future is AI, and people are getting more used to it… brands [are] feeling empowered, too.”

The increasing use of AI-generated imagery in advertising comes at a time when brands have tightened the proverbial belt amid economic uncertainty. When 

 found in May that marketing budgets in 2025 were stagnant, agency executives noted that they had seen shoot budgets decrease this year given that uncertainty.

Olivas estimates that shoot budgets for some brands this year had been cut in half. “Let’s say a company that used to do a $750,000 shoot last year, and have a budget for their shoot [of] $300,000 this year,” Olivas said. “And so that is less shots, less output, less scenes, etc., right?”

When that’s the case, exploring the use of AI-generated imagery in ads is a solution that some marketers are more willing to consider. For others, it’s squeezed timelines and the ability to maximize output.

“It’s not just about being cheap, but it’s about being able to respond quickly, and it’s about being able to connect to things quicker,” Scott Thibodeaux, VP and creative director at Transmission, said.

To Thibodeaux, the appeal of generative AI tools for brands and agencies is not about brands spending less than they would before but about a difference in what brands can get with that same budget. “We can do something [for you] that you just wouldn’t have had before,” he said.

As brands test AI-generated imagery for campaigns, some agency execs don’t expect the use to replace shoots and production altogether.

There’s still trepidation about how much AI-generated advertising is viable and an understanding that people will be more critical of the use of it from brands in categories like fashion and beauty.

“We’re still at a point where people are nervous about it,” Carmel said. “We’re gonna start to see drips and drabs, people, brands are going to be more comfortable using it, but I don’t think we’re going to see a whole-hog replacement of anything for quite some time.”

A split photo montage of two AI-generated ads from Guess and J. Crew, one is a blond woman in a dress leaning against a wall and the other is a man with glasses sketching.

Tightening budgets have some marketers opting for AI imagery

But brands like Guess, J.Crew, and Skechers are finding themselves caught in cycles of consumer backlash for the perceived use of the technology.

Tightening budgets and shortened timelines have some marketers opting for AI imagery

The proliferation of AI tools—and the advertising pitching said tools—can be overwhelming. Companies are pivoting to become “

 because of AI, or finding some other way to communicate that their company won’t be left behind in the AI race.

That overwhelm was something Robbie Ferrara, global creative director at Monday.com, wanted to reflect in the software company’s latest campaign.

“There’s a lot of employees in large corporations that are feeling the pressure to implement AI,” Ferrara told Marketing Brew. “I think we’re all clear that AI is gonna have value, but none of us know how to implement it yet.”

Does Monday.com’s new campaign also pitch a new AI tool? Yes, of course, it does. The 70-second hero spot introduces the tool, Monday Sidekick, by showing its offering as the one that finally soothes workers who are dealing with the pressure to implement AI tools by being the tool that’s actually useful and easy to understand. The company uses humor and an on-the-nose music cue, a cover of 

theme song, “(I’ve Had) The Time of My Life,” to do so.

“We’re trying to be different,” Ferrara said. “We’re coming from a place of value, of love, and the fact that we kind of try and build products people love to use. I think it kind of feels right for us, then [to] speak about all the emotional turmoil that comes from adoption and rolling out a new product.”

The ad, created by Monday.com’s in-house creative team, is just one aspect of the new campaign. Aside from the long-form spot, shorter cuts will be used on streaming channels, and there will be out-of-home ad placements in six major airports, including JFK, LAX, and SFO.

Speaking to the company’s target audience of professionals flooded with these pitches and pressure allowed the creative to reflect the stress and humor of being inundated with all things AI.

“I feel like there is an overwhelm going on, and people are just—you’ve seen the memes, right?” Ferrara said. “There’s the 

 [scene] which is, ‘Sell me this pen,’ and [the meme] just says, ‘It’s got AI.’ There’s just so many funny comedic moments.”

Photo collage of Monday.com's new campaign ad contained in abstract shapes.

Monday.com reflects the ‘pressure to implement AI’ in new ad campaign for AI tools

The software company is aiming to engage with employees’ feelings about AI. 

Jasmine Sheena

Academic cheating is an age-old concern. But while students used to peek at classmates’ Scantron sheets to see which bubbles were filled in, there are new tools that some say could supercharge cheating: generative AI.

That’s not stopping GenAI brands from marketing themselves to not just college students but also faculty this school year. As the fall semester kicks off, companies like Anthropic and OpenAI are pushing their tools as vehicles to promote learning rather than impede it and pitching themselves as educational collaborators to colleges and universities, many of which are in the midst of creating policies to address GenAI use.

At the same time, some of the players in the AI race are targeting students more directly through campus clubs and ambassadorships to get them further integrated with their brands.

“This year, it really has just exploded,” Evan Levine, senior director of IT services and support at Duke University’s Office of Information Technology, told Marketing Brew. “There’s so many tools and offerings, and there’s very little understanding of what the differences are, or how to use these things effectively, or what that means…This summer, we were faced with a major educational challenge…We want people to come back [in the fall] to this amazing suite of tools and services and ways of doing things that they didn’t necessarily have before, but also, how on Earth are they going to know how to use them?”

To understand how GenAI companies are marketing themselves to colleges and students, it’s helpful to understand the needs they say they’re aiming to address. Ahead of the school year, Duke held four GenAI workshops to help educate students on how to use related tools earlier this summer, Levine told Marketing Brew. The university generally considers “good attendance” to its tech workshops to be between 20 to 30 students, Levine said; those four workshops brought in between 700 and 800 students.

For some universities, welcoming AI brands onto campus is an acknowledgement of the inevitable.

“There’s no way we can really completely abandon [GenAI] or…punish students for using it,” Sabit Ekin, associate professor and director of the Generative AI Literacy Initiative at Texas A&M’s Institute of Data Science, told Marketing Brew. “They will be using it.”

OpenAI’s ChatGPT product is one of the most widely used GenAI products by students, with ChatGPT usage hitting a peak of 97.4 billion tokens on May 27 (each token represents about four English characters, according to the company), around the time of finals season for students, according to data released from the AI platform OpenRouter and reported by 

Amid student interest in understanding the tools, GenAI companies are pitching themselves to schools as collaborators to promote learning. OpenAI, which has struck up relationships with both Texas A&M and Duke, has sought to brand its tools as useful for enhancing education. Its NextGenAI consortium, a group designed “to support students, educators, and researchers advancing the frontiers of knowledge,” includes 15 research institutions, including Texas A&M, and Duke, through which it says it is providing $50 million in research grants, funding, and API access. In June, the company held a roundtable in New York, where academics discussed AI in education.

AI is “a fast-growing, fast-paced thing in general,” Levine said. “All these companies are relatively new, and then higher education is a different type of market [with] different types of requirements and demands.”

Another major player in the GenAI space, Anthropic, is taking a student-centric approach to promote its GenAI product Claude to students. In April, the company rolled out Claude for Education, a version customized specifically for higher education, Greg Feingold, who oversees community programs at Anthropic, told Marketing Brew.

Feingold said the students he speaks to “are already very aware that if they use AI to cut corners, it’s not going to be beneficial to their education in the long run,” and that they seem invested in learning “how to use AI thoughtfully.” To that end, the company is seeking out college students to create on-campus “Claude Builder Clubs,” which will organize educational workshops and run hackathons, among other undertakings. In mid-August, Georgia Tech inaugurated the first on-campus Claude Builder Club, and the program is now active at more than 50 universities, including UNC Chapel Hill and Johns Hopkins.

To make further inroads on campuses, Anthropic is also expanding its student ambassador program. Ambassadors represent Claude to student organizations and faculty departments while hosting activations and other events on campus.

Through the programs, Anthropic is aiming to reframe and engage with concerns faculty or students might have about GenAI use in academic settings, Feingold said. As part of a partnership with the London School of Economics that includes free student access to Claude for Education, which became active in May, Anthropic hosted a roundtable with faculty and students to discuss concerns with GenAI use in schools.

“We definitely don’t shy away from exploring the potential concerns of how AI could be used negatively in education,” Feingold said. “In fact, we make it a big part of our programming to explore the issues and potential solutions.”

On campuses, GenAI companies brand themselves as academic friends, not foes

Brands like OpenAI and Anthropic are hoping that faculty and students will see them as promoting learning rather than impeding it.

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MKBR-GenAI in SEO audio embed

Google is all in on AI in its search results. For marketers who have long leaned on SEO best practices to show up in front of internet users, the old rules no longer apply.

“The guidelines that people were publishing even a year ago may not be relevant that much longer,” Simon Poulton, EVP of innovation and growth at the agency Tinuiti, told Marketing Brew.

Google users who are served AI-generated overviews at the top of their search results clicked on search-result links significantly less often than users who did not encounter AI summaries, according to a Pew Research Center 

 released in July. This shift, in which Google has essentially cut off search traffic to third-party sites, has been 

 “Google Zero” and is upending search and creating some major challenges for brands that have used SEO as a way to drive traffic and maintain engagement.

As a result, SEO marketers find themselves looking to engineer new ways to keep users engaged and revisit what metrics are best in a new era of search.

“The entire industry is going through a relearning process right now,” Poulton said.

Google’s AI Overviews, powered by its GenAI model Gemini, first rolled out widely in the US in May 2024, providing AI-generated summaries pulled from news articles or other sources on the web. While AI Overviews appeared on only 6.49% of Google searches in January, by May they showed up on nearly one-fifth of them, according to data compiled by the marketing platform Semrush.

That has had a considerable effect on web traffic for all kinds of sites, including publishers. At Business Insider, traffic dropped 55% from April 2022 to April 2025, according to Similarweb 

 cited by the Wall Street Journal; the “extreme traffic drops,” according to CEO Barbara Peng, were the impetus behind a significant staff cut in May, when the company laid off around 20% of its workforce. At the time, Peng also said the publication was committed to going “all-in on AI.” (Business Insider’s parent company, Insider Inc., is a subsidiary of Axel Springer, the same company that owns Morning Brew.)

Those traffic drops are also affecting brands that rely on search traffic to help drive their businesses. At agency Mediassociates, clients in verticals like healthcare and financial have seen drops in their organic traffic anywhere from 20% to 50% since May 2024, Tim Lathrop, VP, platform digital, said. For now, he said, the agency is advising clients to lean on paid search to complement organic search results.

Poulton echoed this sentiment, noting that there could be a convergence of paid media and organic media, which were once seen as separate.

“Organic is going to be influencing the future of paid and the quality of those experiences, because ultimately, Google’s going to try and drive what gets revenue, and it’s going to be the most related ad to the answer, not the query.”

For marketers looking to improve their SEO results amid the shift to AI Overviews, there are a few strategies that experts recommend. It may be helpful for brands to refresh the content on their website more often—Lathrop suggested at least once a month—and adjust content based on the information people are currently looking for, encouraging users to click through to their sites.

Lathrop also recommended that brands continue building or strengthening their structured data, which Google Search uses to understand the content of a page and can lead to improved search results. If a web page has a recipe listed on it, for example, providing more detailed information, like ingredients and cooking time, can make it more likely that users will click on the link while also making it easier for Google to understand the content on the page.

These existing SEO best practices can be useful for sites seeking good positioning in Google Search results, but also in its AI features, according to a Google Search Central post.

The AI Overview presents the real estate that may be the new frontier for SEO marketers to lay claim to, as brands look to appear in those overviews and provide guidance to users on specific products or services. Poulton predicts that future SEO marketing will focus more on driving overall awareness of a brand or product (what he called “influence and sentiment”) rather than “clicks and rankings.”

“That’s what the future of SEO is. It’s not ‘black hat’ or ‘white hat,’” he said. “It’s purely ‘How do we influence opinion with multiple types of information,’ be it reviews, be it content we’ve created, be it what other folks have said.”

As SEO marketers look to master AI Overviews, there are still yet other challenges Google’s AI may present. For example, the content Google generates in an AI Overview may not always be suitable for a brand—especially if it suggests information that could lead consumers to develop a negative opinion of a brand, Poulton said.

Another challenge is measurement. Some users prefer to read the AI Overview instead of directly clicking on a search result, and measurement platforms are still evolving to gauge web performance with fewer users directly clicking through, Lathrop said.

“In the past, you’d be able to look at clicks to your website and [use]…analytics to understand the engagement of content,” he said. “Now we’re in this era of basically zero-click advertising and just zero-click in general, where people are just reading [the AI overview]...versus clicking and engaging.”

A search bar with colorful digital squares filling it up with AI stars surrounding it

How GenAI is changing the SEO marketing playbook, one AI Overview at a time

We spoke with experts to hear strategies for improving SEO results and the challenges that lie ahead.

Like it or not, GenAI is coming to digital video ad creation.

Almost 9 in 10 digital video buyers are using or plan to use gen AI to aid in the creation of digital video ads, according to a new report from the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB). According to the report, which is based on a survey of 368 advertisers fielded between February 17 and March 7, around 30% of digital video ads will be made with or enhanced by GenAI tools this year, up eight percentage points from 2024; that number is expected to grow to 39% next year.

Small- and mid-tier brands are expected to adapt the tech quicker than larger companies, according to the IAB: “Small spenders,” which the report defines as companies spending less than $10 million annually, expect 45% of their ads to be created with GenAI by 2026, while 36% of “large spenders” (those who spend $50+ million annually) said the same.

Of the respondents who said they were using or planned to use GenAI to create multiple versions of ads, the largest share (42%) said they were doing so to create “versions for different audiences,” while a slightly smaller percentage (38%) said they were using the tech to make “visual and style changes.”

The responses “suggest that the other GenAI capabilities become more valuable when buyers have already solved for reaching the right audience first,” the report read.

The effects on digital video could be considerable. Overall, digital video (defined in the report as CTV, social video, and online video) is expected to make up 58% of total TV and video ad spend in 2025, according to the report. In 2025, digital video spend is expected to grow 14% to $72 billion, while CTV spend is expected to grow 13% to $26.6 billion.

 As advertisers continue to spend on digital video, content quality (43%) and targeting capabilities (39%) ranked as the top two most important criteria when deciding where exactly to put that spend. Targeting capabilities were important to 56% of small spenders, while only 39% of mid-tier and 35% of large brands said the same.

Advertisers of all kinds are looking for more options in the CTV video space, the IAB found, and more than half of buyers reported seeking out more capabilities and options when advertising against live programming on streaming compared to on linear TV, according to the report.

“Although streaming is still an emerging channel for live content...buyers are holding their streaming partners to a higher standard than linear TV,” the report read.

Brand safety and incremental audiences polled highest in terms of expectations buyers have when looking to spend on live content on both streaming platforms and linear TV.

Excluding insertion order transactions, 75% of CTV buys were done programmatically in 2024. This year, that number is projected to grow to 85%.

 When it comes to reasons to buy digital video ads, buyers surveyed were most interested in achieving bottom-funnel outcomes such as store visits (both online and off) and sales (both clocked in at 44%). In terms of measurement preference, 55% said campaign and placement-level KPIs were most important, while 47% said “basic data regarding the adjacent content” was crucial.

But measurement continues to pose some challenges, especially among small spenders: 38% said that “measurement complexity” presents a challenge to activating in digital video programmatically, while “standardization issues” and “leveraging cross-channel data” both were a concern for 36% of small spenders.

A robot arm reaching out and touching a screen displaying a web browser

GenAI is officially coming for digital video ad creation

Nearly 90% of digital video buyers are using or plan to use generative AI for ads, according to a new report from the IAB.

If you’re on the internet these days, you’d be hard-pressed to 

The term, which refers to low-quality AI-generated content that is beginning to 

 on social media platforms like Instagram and video platforms like YouTube, are often bizarre and are sometimes even funny. But for some brands concerned about brand safety and suitability, having ads run against such content might be no laughing matter.

On YouTube though, ads for brands are sometimes appearing next to such AI-slop content. A look at several YouTube pages that post AI slop revealed some major brands’ advertisements showing up against those pages’ content, which ranges from simply strange to AI-generated misinformation.

One channel, called Pan-African Dreams, has shared misinformation and recently 

 for posting a lengthy deepfake video that falsely depicts Pope Leo XIV delivering a speech praising Ibrahim Traoré, the military leader of Burkina Faso, prompting a 

 from the Vatican. In mid-May, the video had 

Marketing Brew observed brands including HBO Max, Amazon Hub Delivery, theater ticket seller TodayTix, and the tourism site Visit Florida appearing against content on the channel.

Another AI slop channel, Banana Adventure, posts bizarre videos mostly centered on Minions, the characters from the Despicable Me

franchise, as well as other characters like the Joker. Marketing Brew observed ads for Amazon Hub Delivery, Android, and Tia Health next to that channel’s content.

And on a third AI slop channel with the name Mikey, which seems to post mostly what appear to be AI-generated cartoon stills with AI-generated voice-overs, including images of Mickey and Minnie Mouse, Marketing Brew saw ads for Adobe and Samsung Home Appliances.

In an email, Google spokesperson Nate Funkhouser told Marketing Brew that YouTube does not currently offer advertisers the ability to opt out of appearing next to AI-generated content. “We offer controls for advertisers to decide where their ads run based on the content of a video, not how it was produced,” Funkhouser said in the statement.

Emails requesting comment sent to Android, HBO Max, Samsung, TodayTix, and Visit Florida went unreturned. Representatives for Adobe, Amazon Hub Delivery, and Tia Health did not provide comment.

After viewing the ads on Banana Adventure and Pan-African Dreams and requesting comment from YouTube, both channels were removed from the platform. The Mikey channel, meanwhile, was not found to violate YouTube’s policies, according to Google.

For some brands, monitoring exactly where their ads are showing up on YouTube has already seemed like a game of Whac-A-Mole. In recent years, major brands’ advertisements have been spotted running against 

, even, at times, those that were using brand-safety tools.

In the case of AI slop on YouTube, though, some of those existing challenges for brand safety and suitability stand to be multiplied. Brands should be mindful about appearing next to AI-generated content, said Anirudh Dhebar, a marketing professor at Babson College, as advertising next to AI slop could contain reputational risk for brands. 

And while a brand may not necessarily take issue with being associated with AI-generated content in itself, issues could arise if that AI-generated slop overlaps with other potentially damaging content. Both Disney and Universal are 

 the generative AI company Midjourney, alleging that users can easily create images based on protected intellectual property, representing a “bottomless pit of plagiarism.”

Tyler Folkman, GM at TubeBuddy, which offers a suite of tools for YouTubers, said that he doesn’t expect many AI slop channels to flourish for too long on YouTube due to likely low levels of engagement on their videos, but he acknowledged that it can be difficult to get problematic AI slop videos taken down from YouTube due to the platform’s vast size.

As of March 2024, YouTube has put in place some restrictions on uploading AI-generated content that requires creators to disclose if AI tools were used to create a video. More broadly, YouTube has policies 

, and other types of content on the platform.

Dhebar told Marketing Brew that the proliferation of AI slop in its various forms can present additional challenges for advertisers.

“If I'm an advertiser, I need to be very mindful, and I’m in a precarious point,” he explained. “On one hand, I want the biggest bang for my dollar, that's in the short term; [in] the longer term, there might be significant reputational risk. How do I balance those two?”

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