The Next Breakthrough in AI Advertising Is Emotional

AI made advertising fast. A spot that once took weeks now takes an afternoon, and a marketer who used to wait on a production house can generate a finished-looking ad before lunch. But speed has surfaced a new problem, and it isn't the one the industry expected. The risk is less that AI ads look fake and more that they look finished but leave no impression at all.

Toby Martin, Chief Content Officer at the fractional marketing firm We Are Unchained, believes the problem isn't consumer backlash, and it isn't some tell-tale AI glitch. It's creative mediocrity.

"The consumer doesn't care how adverts are put together," he says. "They don't care how much they cost. What they care about is how they're made to feel."

An ad that makes someone feel something works. One that doesn't, however polished, doesn't, and more output alone won't change that.

That reframes the whole conversation. The question stops being how much AI you can put into an ad, and becomes what the ad is actually for.

What actually makes an ad land

Ask the people who study why ads work, and almost none of them lead with technology. They lead with feeling.

Julie Xiu, who leads global sports and brand partnerships at NetApp, describes the feeling from the other side, as a viewer. She still remembers the ad that gave her goosebumps, a spot that landed with pure emotion and, in her words, "no technology, no logo, no nothing." The craft was invisible. The feeling was the point.

That's the bar. And it's set by story and emotion, not by the model that rendered the frames, a sign of how completely creative has moved to the center of the ad business.

Where raw generation stalls

None of this means the tools don't work. It means that more output, on its own, doesn't guarantee a stronger story.

Erik Candiani, Director of Marketing at Nexstar Media Group, compares generating creative to pulling a slot machine handle: "It's close to what you want, but not quite. So I pull it again, and now it's completely different." In that workflow, impressive output can still need another pass. Candiani's team still sends a drone up for real aerials, because their local viewers know the area, and a convincing but invented version of a place people recognize breaks the spell.

The gap isn't the quality of the pixels. It's judgment, knowing which version is right, what to keep, where the story actually lands. Volume with no story behind it produces more of the same problem, which is why what a tool is aimed at matters more than how much it can make.

Generating stories worth watching

AI can develop the concept, emotional arc, script and storyboard. The question is how well those elements come together into a story that connects.

That gives creative teams something substantial to respond to: story-driven concepts they can review, choose and refine. They don’t have to arrive with every scene already imagined. They can explore different directions and decide which best captures the brand, speaks to the audience and serves the advertiser’s goals.

The craft still matters. AI expands what teams can imagine and make, while their understanding of the advertiser helps shape the result. The standard remains the same: does the story give someone a reason to care?

Where this goes next

Put those threads together and a direction emerges. The advertising that stands out over the next few years will be the work where AI helps develop stories that connect.

The opportunity goes beyond more variations, more motion and more output. The more useful question is whether a tool can generate coherent, emotionally engaging concepts and carry that story through the finished ad, with people able to review and refine the work along the way. Technology built that way, from the ground up, puts the story first.

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Better AI ads start with stories that give audiences a reason to care. That’s the idea behind Waymark Cinematic: AI that develops story-driven concepts and brings them to life as beautiful, cinematic commercials.

Join us November 4 at noon ET for a live demo and Q&A to see what that looks like in action.

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