Formats & creative · also called GenAI ads, AI-generated ads
Generative AI in advertising
Generative AI in advertising is the use of AI models that create text, images, video, audio or code to produce ads, variations, targeting and campaign setups, often automatically at scale.
Generative AI can write headlines, generate product images and backgrounds, create video and voiceovers, translate and localise ads, and suggest audiences and budgets. Major platforms have built it into their tools: Google's Performance Max and Meta's Advantage+ can generate or remix creative assets, and many DCO and creative platforms use it to make thousands of variations.
The benefits are speed and scale: small advertisers can produce professional-looking ads, and large ones can test far more ideas. The risks are real too: factual errors, brand inconsistency, copyright and likeness questions, bias, and a flood of low-quality AI-written pages. AI-generated content farms have become a notable part of the made-for-advertising sites problem, and deepfake-style ads are used in scams and malvertising.
Regulators increasingly expect disclosure of synthetic content, and platforms have introduced labelling rules for AI-generated or altered ads, particularly political ones. The AI boom is also changing where ads appear, with ads inside AI assistants and AI search.
Think of it like this
Generative AI in advertising is like giving a design studio a tireless junior who drafts a thousand posters overnight: fast and useful, but someone still has to check every one.
An example
An online furniture retailer in Brazil uses AI to generate 200 lifestyle backgrounds for 50 products, tests them via DCO, and keeps the 20 best-performing images.
Related terms
DCO (dynamic creative optimization)
DCO (dynamic creative optimization) is technology that assembles ads automatically from templates and data, changing images, text, offers or prices for each viewer or context and learning which versions perform best.
Creative
A creative is the actual ad content a person sees or hears, such as an image, video, audio spot, HTML5 animation or native text, delivered into an ad slot.
Ads in AI assistants and AI search
Ads in AI assistants and AI search are paid placements that appear within or beside AI-generated answers, such as in Google's AI Overviews or ChatGPT, often matched to the conversation's context.
Made-for-advertising (MFA) sites
Made-for-advertising (MFA) sites are websites built mainly to generate ad revenue, typically with thin content, heavy ad density, fast refreshing ads and traffic bought through arbitrage.
Brand safety
Brand safety is the practice of keeping ads away from content that is harmful or universally unacceptable, such as terrorism, child abuse, hate speech or illegal activity, to protect an advertiser's reputation.