The State of AI Commercials 2026: AI Advertising Statistics From 242 Real Campaigns

The short answer. AI commercials are now routine, though not in the way most statistics suggest. We counted 242 campaigns (972 films) in 10 regions whose makers say on the record that AI made them: 42 in 2024, 123 in 2025 and 77 by 20 October 2026. Nearly half were fully generated, and only one upload in four tells viewers.

Search for AI advertising statistics and you get surveys of what advertisers plan, forecasts of what AI will be worth, and one number that keeps getting bigger as it travels: that 40% of all ads are now made with AI. Nobody we could find had counted the commercials themselves. Runway, which sells the tools, says on its own site that "There’s no single official count" (Runway). So we built one. We make live-action, hybrid and fully AI films for brands in India and abroad, and eight of the campaigns in this count are ours. Over October 2026 we collected every commercial we could find whose brand, agency or maker said in public that generative AI made part of it, re-opened every source, checked every official upload on YouTube, and read 1,894 of the comments viewers left on them. This report is what that dataset shows, set beside the best research on how advertisers use AI and how audiences respond.

Published 25 October 2026 by Ganesh Pareek. The dataset closed on 20 October 2026; YouTube views, likes, descriptions and comments were read on 22 and 23 October 2026. We will publish the 2027 edition in February 2027, after the holiday season and the Super Bowl.

Key takeaways

• AI commercials went from experiment to routine in 2025. Our count found 123 campaigns released in 2025, nearly three times the 42 of 2024, and 77 more by 20 October 2026.
• Fully generated films lead: 111 of the 242 campaigns (46%) were made entirely by AI, 42 (17%) were hybrids of live action and generated shots, and the share of AI films personalised for each viewer fell from 24% in 2024 to 1% in 2026.
• AI-native studios are taking the work. Leaving out our own films, their share of AI commercials rose from 12% in 2024 to 31% in 2026, while agencies’ in-house units fell from 37% to 20%. For 30% of campaigns, nobody has said who made the film.
• Brands tell the trade press, not the viewer. Only 42 of the 177 official YouTube uploads we checked (24%) say in the title or description that AI was used, and that share fell from 39% in 2024 to 12% in 2026.
• Viewers who talk about AI are mostly against it. In the top 50 comments on 112 films, about 29% discuss AI; of the comments that name it, 62% are negative, and those negative comments hold 99% of the likes.
• The backlash is concentrated. At least 19 campaigns drew published backlash and 3 were pulled; 13 of the 19 were fully generated, and 8 were holiday, anniversary or revival films, most of them for household names.
• In testing, AI ads still trail. Kantar’s pretests put AI-made ads at the 54th percentile against the 65th for others, and Ipsos and Syracuse University found human-made ads 14% stronger in the short term. India is the exception in Kantar’s data, where AI ads test at par.

AI advertising statistics 2026 at a glance

The first block comes from our dataset of 242 campaigns. The second is the best third-party data, each figure from its original source.

How many AI commercials are there?

Nobody publishes an official count. The nearest figures measure something else. The ad-measurement firm iSpot found that 15 of the 66 ads in Super Bowl LX in February 2026 "featured AI" (Sports Business Journal), but that count mixes ads made with AI and ads selling AI products. Award shows count declarations: 40% of Cannes Lions 2026 entries said they used AI in the work, up from 20% in 2025 and 11% in 2024, the festival’s chair Phil Thomas told Campaign on 25 June 2026, though part of that rise reflects stricter declaration rules. Surveys count advertisers, not ads: 62% of US digital video buyers now use generative AI for video creative, according to the IAB’s July 2026 report.

Our dataset counts films. An AI commercial, for this count, is a brand-commissioned ad whose picture or sound was partly or wholly made by a generative AI model, where the brand, its agency, its production company or AI studio, an award entry or trade press quoting one of them says so. Spec ads, fan films, tool demos and films that are only about AI are out. So are rumours: an ad that "looks AI" is not in the count until someone who made it says so.

On that definition we found 242 campaigns released between 1 January 2024 and 20 October 2026, containing 972 individual films (a campaign can hold one film or hundreds of personalised versions). By year:

The regions break down as India 110 campaigns, the US 31, Latin America 23, Asia-Pacific 20, Europe 14, the Middle East 14, global campaigns 11, Canada 8, the UK 7 and Africa 4. India’s share is a product of where we looked hardest: Indian trade press covers launches in detail, and we had already been tracking Indian AI ads since 2024. That is why we report India and the rest of the world side by side throughout, rather than letting India’s numbers steer the global shares.

Two things stand out in the timing. 2025 was the break: releases in our count went from four to six a month early in 2025 to 18 in June and 18 in December, the month of holiday ads. And 2026 is running a little below that pace, at 5 to 11 campaigns a month, partly because recent campaigns are still being written up. The 2026 total will rise as late-year work is reported, so treat 77 as a floor.

The true number is far higher than ours. Most AI in advertising is never announced: Meta says 9 million small businesses use at least one of its AI ad creative tools (Meta Q2 2026 earnings call), and almost none of those ads will ever be written about. What our count measures is the visible end: the films that brands put their names to.

What does the AI actually do in an AI commercial?

"Made with AI" covers six different jobs. We sorted every campaign by what the makers said the AI did.

The mix moved fast. In 2024, 24% of the campaigns in our count were personalised films, most of them Indian: a star records once and AI makes hundreds or thousands of versions that greet each customer by name. It fell to 4% in 2025 and 1% in 2026. Fully generated films went the other way, from 33% of campaigns in 2024 to 51% in 2025, and 44% in 2026 so far. Hybrids held steady: 19%, 15% and 21%.

Across every role, a real person’s face or voice was generated or altered in 29 campaigns (12%), from the late Stan Lee in an ElevenLabs launch film to Rahul Dravid in three Shriram Life Insurance commercials made in six languages. Rules for those films are tightening: New York has required ads to disclose synthetic performers since 9 June 2026 (New York State Assembly), and SAG-AFTRA’s 2025 commercials contracts make performer consent mandatory before a digital replica is made (SAG-AFTRA). Our guide to AI actors in ads covers consent and pay by market.

Only 63 campaigns (26%) name the models used. Among them, Google’s Veo appears most often (18 campaigns, 15 of them in 2025), followed by Runway (11), Kling (8) and OpenAI’s tools (8). OpenAI’s Sora appears in two 2024 films, among them the Toys"R"Us brand film, made with an early alpha version.

The films are short. The median official upload runs 45 seconds; 69 of the 177 we checked (39%) run 30 seconds or less, and 56 (32%) run past a minute.

Who makes AI commercials?

The answer has changed every year. We recorded the maker each source credits: an AI-native studio, a traditional production house, an agency’s in-house unit, the brand’s own team, a solo creator or an AI tool vendor.

We left our own films out of this table because including them would inflate the production-house line in 2026, when six of our eight campaigns were released. With them in, traditional production houses made 14% of all 242 campaigns.

Outside India the shift is sharper still: AI-native studios made 18 of the 34 non-Indian campaigns released in 2026, more than half. These are companies founded to make AI films, such as Secret Level and Silverside AI (Coca-Cola’s two holiday campaigns), Genre.ai (IM8’s film with Aryna Sabalenka), Native Foreign (Toys"R"Us, Virgin Voyages) and, in the Gulf and India, studios such as Studio Blo. Agencies built in-house units first, in 2024, and they still make a fifth of the films, but they no longer lead.

Two other makers surprised us. Broadcasters’ advertising sales teams now make generative AI commercials for advertisers who could not otherwise afford television: ITV, Channel 4 and Seven.One in Germany each made such films, Channel 4’s first being Dream Mart for Spirit Studios in July 2025 (Clearcast). And solo creators made seven campaigns, the best known being PJ Accetturo’s Kalshi spot, which ran during the 2025 NBA Finals on YouTube TV, before he formed the studio Genre.ai.

Nearly a third of AI commercials (73 of 242, 30%) have no credited maker anywhere we could find. In India the figure is 46%; outside India, 17%. For a buyer that matters: if you cannot see who made a film, you cannot ask them what went wrong in it.

"AI use in production has gone from optional to expected; clients ask about it directly in briefs now," Assi Rahbani, managing director for the Middle East and North Africa at the production company TAG, told Campaign Middle East on 15 October 2026. For our own view of how to judge the studios now competing for this work, see how to choose an AI video production company.

Which brands and categories make AI commercials?

Food and drink brands made the most: 40 campaigns, 17% of the total. Then come finance, insurance and fintech (30, 12%), technology and telecoms (25, 10%), home, durables and real estate (25, 10%), fashion and beauty (23, 10%), retail and e-commerce (21, 9%), travel and airlines (18, 7%) and cars (12, 5%). Public bodies, charities and tourism boards made 10. AI companies advertising their own products made only 4, a reminder that most AI commercials sell biscuits and loans, not software.

The mix differs by region. In the Americas, food, retail and public-sector campaigns lead; outside the Americas and India, technology and telecoms brands lead (13 of 64), several of them telecom operators in Korea, Japan and the Gulf using AI films to promote their own AI services. In India, food and drink and home and real estate brands tie at 18 campaigns each, followed by finance at 16.

The biggest names keep coming back. The Coca-Cola Company appears five times across our count: two global Holidays Are Coming campaigns, Mr. Pibb’s relaunch, a Vietnamese new year film and Fanta’s 2026 Halloween trailer. Agoda appears four times, in India and across Asia. Repeat use is the clearest sign of a decision rather than an experiment: as Coca-Cola’s Pratik Thakar put it to The Hollywood Reporter in November 2025, "if the majority of consumers see it in a positive way it’s worth going forward."

Do brands tell viewers an ad was made with AI?

Mostly not. Brands and their makers tell the trade press: 190 of the 197 campaigns where we could tell (96%) were announced as AI at launch. That figure is high partly by design, since a film only enters our count once someone says it used AI. The viewer’s side is the one that matters, and there the picture changes.

We checked the official YouTube upload of every campaign that has one (177 of 242) on 22 and 23 October 2026 and read each title and description, in its own language, for any statement that AI made the film. Only 42 said so (24%). Product features did not count: a phone ad that praises an "AI camera" is describing the phone.

The share is falling as AI becomes ordinary: 39% of 2024 uploads said AI was used, 12% of 2026 uploads did. The novelty that made brands boast about AI in 2024 has worn off, and nothing has yet replaced it with a habit of saying so. Korean and Japanese brands are the clear exception. LG H&H’s 2025 laundry ad with the table tennis player Shin Yu-bin says in its description that it was made with generative AI; KDDI’s au and Somi Foods put generative AI in the title.

On the film itself, disclosure is rarer still. We found sources confirming an on-screen AI line on only four films, among them Booking.com’s 2026 campaign and Valentino’s 2025 handbag film, and a line saying "Some content is computer-generated." on our own Air India film. That is a floor: few sources describe end frames at all.

We also meant to count YouTube’s own AI label, which the platform moved below the player on 27 May 2026 and now applies automatically when it detects significant photorealistic AI (YouTube). We could not. Three videos that carried the label when we last checked them, on 10 October 2026, showed no label to a signed-out visitor on 22 October, on desktop or mobile, in the US or India. We do not know whether YouTube has changed how the label is shown or to whom, so we have left platform labels out rather than report a number we cannot reproduce.

None of our own seven uploads says AI in its title or description either. We count that against ourselves. Our AI ad films page promises films disclosed "by function, not fashion", and on YouTube we have not yet done it.

The rules are arriving anyway. India’s IT Rules amendment on synthetically generated content has applied since 20 February 2026 (Vikaspedia, Government of India); the EU AI Act’s Article 50 requires deepfake content to be disclosed from 2 August 2026, with a lighter duty for creative works (AI Act, Article 50). China has required a prominent label at the start of AI-generated video since 1 September 2025 (Cyberspace Administration of China), and South Korea’s AI Basic Act, which includes labelling of deepfakes, took effect on 22 January 2026 (US International Trade Administration). The UK has "no blanket legal requirement" to disclose AI in ads (ASA). Our guide to whether AI ads are legal in India covers the Indian rules in detail.

Practitioners split on whether a label hurts. "The moment you put an ‘AI generated’ label on an emotional brand film, you break the suspension of disbelief," Ganesh Pareek, a partner at First December Films, told BestMediaInfo in May 2026. Duane Varan of the research firm MediaScience reported the opposite from testing: "if the creative is good, disclosure does not hurt it" (MarTech Cube, May 2026). Our dataset suggests the label is not what decides the outcome. Two of the three films that were pulled, McDonald’s Netherlands’ and Prinzen Rolle’s, had said at launch that they used AI. Viewers objected to the film, not to the honesty.

How do audiences react to AI commercials?

Most AI commercials draw no comment about AI at all. Some draw a storm. We read the top 50 comments (in YouTube’s "top" order, the ones a viewer sees first) on every official upload that allows them: 1,894 comments on 112 films, each read in its original language. Two independent coding passes labelled them against the same written rules, and agreed on 97% of whether a comment was about AI and 95% of its stance.

The hostility gathers where the film replaces something people loved. On Coca-Cola’s 2025 holiday film, all 15 comments about AI in the top 50 were negative; the most liked comment on the official upload reads "The most profitable commercial in Pepsi’s history." Fanta’s 2026 Halloween trailer (14 of 15 negative), Coca-Cola Vietnam’s new year film (12 of 15) and Tata Gluco+'s 2025 film in India (22 of 26) followed the same pattern. In the Americas, negative AI comments outnumbered positive ones by 128 to 18.

The exceptions are telling. LG Uplus’s 2024 Korean film, whose title calls it an ad born 100% from AI, drew 26 positive comments about the AI and no negative ones. Under Armour’s 2024 Anthony Joshua film, a hybrid whose upload says "we used the power of AI", drew more praise (9) than criticism (5) among viewers, even though creatives attacked it on Instagram. Where the brand presented AI as the point of the film, viewers judged the film; where AI stood in for a familiar tradition, they judged the brand.

Published backlash follows the same lines. At least 19 campaigns in our dataset drew a reported negative reaction to their use of AI, and 3 were withdrawn: McDonald’s Netherlands’ 2025 Christmas film, which BBC News reported was pulled after viewers attacked it; Prinzen Rolle’s 70th anniversary spot in Germany, taken off YouTube after an online storm over its AI scenes (Horizont); and the Hong Kong Correctional Services’ 2026 anti-drug music video (Marketing-Interactive). Of the 19, 13 were fully generated and 10 were in the Americas. Backlash was researched for only part of the dataset, so 19 is a floor, not a rate.

The surveys point the same way. In a Gallup survey run in May 2026 and published in August, 49% of Americans said they view businesses’ use of AI to create ads negatively and 19% positively, and 62% said AI-created people or voices in ads are unacceptable even when disclosed (Gallup; 3,270 US adults). Younger adults are the most critical: 66% of 18 to 29 year olds view AI-made ads negatively. Executives misread this: 82% of US ad executives believe Gen Z and Millennial consumers feel positive about AI ads, against 45% of those consumers who actually do (IAB with Sonata Insights, January 2026).

"Why just remake an ad you produced with a camera? It just makes people feel like they’re losing their jobs," Yonatan Dor of the AI production company The Dor Brothers told Deadline in December 2025. Our comment data agrees with him.

Do AI ads work? What the testing data says

Test results and comment sections disagree, and both are right about different things. Coca-Cola’s 2024 and 2025 AI holiday films both scored 5.9 stars, the maximum, in System1’s emotional-response test (System1, November 2025), the same films whose top YouTube comments about AI were almost all hostile (29 of 30 across the two). System1’s Andrew Tindall explained the gap in The Drum in September 2026: "When prompted, people perform outrage about AI use. When they’re not told, they can’t tell they don’t care."

The larger datasets are less kind to AI.

• Kantar, global pretests. Generative AI ads in Kantar’s LINK database average the 54th percentile on overall impact, against the 65th for non-AI ads (Kantar, March 2026). Ads where the AI does not draw attention to itself do better: over 40% of them land in the top tier for branded cut-through (Kantar, November 2025).
• Ipsos and Syracuse University. Ten human-made ads from before 2021 were remade with AI from briefs reverse-engineered from the originals, and all 20 were shown to 3,000 US consumers. Only 25% of viewers of the AI versions were even somewhat confident they were AI, yet the human-made ads were 14% stronger on short-term effect and 17% stronger on long-term brand effect (Ipsos, May 2026). "But even looking real enough to make consumers believe they’re seeing human-designed ads is not the same as working well," the study’s lead, Adam Peruta of Syracuse University, wrote in Harvard Business Review in September 2026.
• NielsenIQ. In a 2024 neuroscience test of more than 2,000 people, AI-generated ads, even those rated high quality, produced weaker memory activation than traditional ads (NIQ, December 2024; older than our usual two-year window, kept because nothing newer measures memory).
• Kantar, India. "In contrast, in India, GenAI ads perform at par with traditionally produced ads, including on emotional response metrics," writes Prasanna Kumar, Kantar’s executive vice president for India (Kantar, 2026).

Put together with our comment data, the evidence says this: viewers cannot reliably tell an AI ad from a human-made one, but the AI versions still tend to persuade a little less, and when viewers do find out, the ones who care are angry. The safest AI film is a good film that does not depend on hiding how it was made.

Are AI commercials faster and cheaper to make?

Faster, nearly always. Cheaper, often, though not as much as the headlines suggest. These are the production figures makers and brands have published for campaigns in our dataset, from two days to eighteen months.

The low end is real but rare. The Kalshi figure covers prompting only; the filmmaker’s fee was not disclosed. At the other end, the people who make the most-watched AI films insist the saving is in time, not money. "We tell our clients this is not about spending less money. It’s about using budgets more efficiently," Jason Zada of Secret Level told The Hollywood Reporter. Melanie Bridge of The Sweetshop, defending the McDonald’s film, wrote that "the hours that went into this job far exceeded a traditional shoot. Ten people, five weeks, full-time" (NBC News, relaying her since-deleted post). In India, FCB Kinnect’s chief creative officer Neville Shah put it in four words: "Good AI is not cheap" (exchange4media, October 2025).

The pattern in our dataset is that AI removes the shoot, not the work. Concept, casting, design, approvals, edit and sound still take people and weeks; what disappears is the crew day, the location and the waiting. For campaigns of many films, that changes the economics most. For one hero film, it changes less than buyers expect. We price our own AI work as campaigns, not clips, for that reason (our AI page), and our guide to AI ad film cost in India explains when AI, live action or hybrid suits a brief.

How is India different?

India is the largest single market in our count: Indian advertisers account for 111 campaigns and 419 films (110 of the campaigns made for India itself), in every year from 2024. Three things set it apart.

First, India adopted early and personally. In 2024, 7 of the 16 Indian campaigns (excluding ours) were personalised films, most of them built on a star: Cadbury Silk’s personalised love stories curated by Zoya Akhtar, Agoda’s 250-plus destination videos of Ayushmann Khurrana, and personalised greetings in the voices of Sourav Ganguly for Dabur and Saif Ali Khan for Behrouz Biryani. That format has almost disappeared since.

Second, India’s AI commercials are less often credited. For 46% of Indian campaigns no maker is named in any source we found, against 17% outside India. Indian trade coverage tends to name the agency and the brand, and to describe the film as "AI-led" or "AI-powered" without saying how much AI made. That is why 41 Indian campaigns sit in our "extent not stated" group.

Third, Indian AI ads test better than the global average, by Kantar’s account. Kantar reports that GenAI ads in India perform at par with traditionally produced ones, and that 15% of the unfinished ads it tested in India in 2025 were generative AI animatic films, most of them in the last six months of that year. Indian brands are using AI to test ideas before they shoot as well as to make the final film; our guide to AI previs, animatics and storyboards covers that side.

Disclosure on YouTube is close to the global rate: 19 of 88 Indian uploads (22%) say AI was used. India’s own advertising rules are about to change that. The Advertising Standards Council of India (ASCI, the industry’s self-regulator) signed its final guidelines on labelling synthetic content on 17 September 2026; they take effect three months after publication, around the end of December 2026 (ASCI guidelines). "Where AI use is unlikely to impact consumer understanding, the guidelines do not mandate disclosures, thereby avoiding label fatigue," ASCI’s chief executive Manisha Kapoor told ETBrandEquity in June 2026.

Our own eight campaigns are in the Indian count: the AI film for Air India’s There is an Air About India campaign, 32 fully AI Razorpay founder films for IPL 2026 (the Indian Premier League, the country’s main cricket tournament), and hybrid films for Malaysia Airlines, vivo, Meta, Campa Cola, Star Sports and Performax with Jasprit Bumrah. Malaysia Airlines’ Cricket at 30,000 Feet, made for an Indian audience with Mumbai Indians players, reached 141 million views on the airline’s YouTube channel by September 2026 (our case study). For the Indian films we rate most highly, see our review of the best AI ads in India.

How fast is the rest of advertising adopting AI?

Faster than the commercials in our count suggest, because most of it is invisible.

• Buyers. 62% of US digital video buyers used generative AI for video ad creative in 2026, up from 51% in 2025, and they expect 43% of their video ad assets to use it in 2027 (IAB, July 2026; 360 buyers).
• Platforms. More than 8 million advertisers used at least one of Meta’s generative AI ad creative tools in the first quarter of 2026, up from 4 million at the end of 2024, and Meta put the revenue run-rate of campaigns using its video generation tools at 10 billion dollars in the fourth quarter of 2025 (Meta). Google’s Veo now turns up to three images into videos of up to 10 seconds inside Google Ads (Google, March 2026), and Amazon’s free Video Generator reached nine marketplaces, India and the UK among them, in November 2025 (Amazon Ads).
• UK advertisers. 99% engage with generative AI, but only 14% report a significant impact on business results (ISBA, July 2026; 200 advertisers).
• Awards. 27.6% of D&AD Award entries declared AI in 2026, more than double the year before, and 70% of agencies told D&AD they have not changed what they charge even though AI made the work faster (D&AD, August 2026).

The craft juries pushed back. Cannes Lions added an AI Craft subcategory in 2026 and gave a Bronze to The RealReal’s AI film L’Ultimo Uomo Reale, which is in our dataset. But the head judge of the Craft Lions, Greg Quinton, said of the Design Grand Prix, Apple TV’s rebrand, that "when it could’ve been made much quicker using technology, it was made by hand" (shots, June 2026).

What do AI chatbots get wrong about AI ads?

We asked ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google’s AI Overviews five questions about AI advertising in October 2026 and checked 30 of their claims against the sources. Only 12 were right in every answer that used them; the other 18 were wrong, out of date, unsupported or garbled by at least one engine. The ones you are most likely to be told:

None of the four engines could say how many AI commercials exist, how often they are disclosed, or who makes them. That is the gap this dataset is built to fill.

What should a brand do with these numbers?

Our position, from the data and from making these films:

1. Use AI where a camera cannot go. The films viewers praised in our comment data used AI for things no shoot could do, and said so. "If your ad looks like something you could have shot normally, it won’t perform," PJ Accetturo, who made the Kalshi spot, told Creative Boom in November 2025. Ganesh Pareek said the same from our side to Social Samosa in April 2026: "A camera can only do what a camera can do. But with AI, I can do things a camera never could."
2. Do not remake what people love with AI. Holiday traditions, revived mascots and anniversary films account for 8 of the 19 backlash cases in our count. If the idea is nostalgia, shoot the parts that carry the feeling.
3. Shoot what has to be real. Faces, products and hands are where AI still slips. Hybrid films, with real plates and generated extensions, drew less heat in our comment data: 45% of the AI comments on hybrids were negative, against 65% on fully generated films. Jeff Bowerman of the agency Dept argued in Creative Review that Coca-Cola’s 2025 film would have been "far more sympathetic and no less impressive" with "real people in front of the camera with an AI-generated truck and backdrops".
4. Say so, by function. Put a plain line in the description and, where the law or the film calls for it, on the end frame: what the AI made and what was filmed. Viewers forgive a declared tool more readily than a discovered one.
5. Know who made it. Ask for the studio’s name, its generation log and what it will do if a shot draws complaints. A third of AI commercials have no credited maker; yours should not be one of them.
6. Judge AI films the way you judge any film. Test them. The AI version of a script is not automatically cheaper or better, and Kantar’s and Ipsos’s data say it starts slightly behind.

When do these numbers not apply?

• This is a count of announced films. Ads that used AI quietly are not in it, so every share here describes AI commercials that someone chose to talk about.
• India is over-represented because we track Indian trade press closely; read India and the rest of the world separately.
• 2026 is incomplete. Campaigns from late 2026 are still being reported.
• Backlash was researched for only part of the dataset. The 19 campaigns with published backlash are a minimum.
• YouTube views measure media spend as much as appeal. Many brand uploads are served as paid video ads, so their views follow budgets: the median upload in our dataset drew one comment per 33,000 views. Booking.com’s 2026 campaign alone accounts for 505 million of the 1.6 billion views across the 177 uploads.
• Comments come from people who chose to comment. They show what the loudest viewers think, not the average viewer, which is why we set them beside Gallup’s, Kantar’s and Ipsos’s samples.

What changes in 2027?

Some changes are already dated:

• 2 December 2026: providers of generative AI systems already on the EU market must mark their output as machine-readable from this date (European Commission).
• About 29 December 2026: ASCI’s labelling guidelines take effect in India.
• 1 January 2027: California’s synthetic performer disclosure law for ads takes effect.

Forecasts, labelled as whose they are:

• US video ad buyers (IAB, July 2026): generative AI will be used in 43% of their video ad assets in 2027, up from a third in 2026.
• Meta: the company aims to let brands create and target ads fully with AI by the end of 2026, The Wall Street Journal reported in June 2025 (Campaign Asia); Mark Zuckerberg described the same direction on Meta’s earnings calls.
• Ours: in 2027, fewer AI commercials will be announced as AI and more will be labelled as AI. Brands will stop presenting AI as the story, while EU, Indian and Californian rules make the end-frame or description line routine for realistic films. We also expect AI-native studios and production houses with their own AI teams to make most of the visible work, and the brands that drew backlash in 2024 and 2025 to move to hybrid films for their biggest moments.

We will test those forecasts against the 2027 edition of this dataset in February 2027, after the holiday season and the Super Bowl.

How we built the dataset

What counts. A brand-commissioned commercial or campaign film (TV, cinema, online or social video, digital out-of-home) first released between 1 January 2024 and 20 October 2026, in which generative AI made a material part of the picture or sound, and where the brand, its agency, its production company or AI studio, an award entry, or trade press quoting one of them says so. We excluded spec ads, fan and student films, tool demos, music videos, films that are only about AI, films where AI was used only for scripts or storyboards, and political party ads. Rumours stayed out.

How we found the films. We searched trade press in English and in local languages (Ad Age, Adweek, Campaign, The Drum, LBBonline, Muse, Marketing Dive, afaqs, exchange4media, Campaign Middle East, B&T, Meio & Mensagem, Horizont, Korean and Japanese business press among them), award results with AI categories (Cannes Lions, Clio, Strategy Awards, Kyoorius, Good Ads Matter, Campaign India AI Awards, Cairns Crocodiles), AI studios’ credits and brand newsrooms. Earlier lists we had built for this blog were used only as leads; every source was re-opened in October 2026.

What we recorded. For each of 254 verified campaigns: brand, category, market, release date, agency, maker and maker type, director, what the AI did in the makers’ words, whether a real person’s likeness was generated, tools named, published time and cost figures, the verbatim quote that establishes AI use with its URL and date, the official upload, backlash and whether the film was pulled, and awards. Every quote was matched word for word against a saved copy of its source page.

What we did not count. 11 campaigns rest on a single secondary source and one is a political party ad; we list them but leave them out of every figure, which leaves 242 campaigns.

YouTube checks. On 22 and 23 October 2026 we read the official upload of 177 campaigns (views, likes, comment count, length, title and description) and hand-coded every title or description that mentioned AI. Comments: up to the top 50 top-level comments per film in YouTube’s "top" order, 1,894 in all. One coding pass labelled every comment matching AI terms (342) and a random sample of 150 that did not; a second, independent pass labelled a blind sample of 120. Both passes were run by AI models working from the same written codebook, and we read every disagreement ourselves. They agreed on 96.7% of the about-AI calls (Cohen’s kappa 0.92) and 95.1% of stances (kappa 0.91); the eight disagreements were borderline, mostly Korean and Japanese comments praising a brand’s AI theme rather than how the film was made.

Our own films. Eight of the 242 campaigns are ours. They are marked in the list, and we exclude them from the maker trend so that we do not flatter our own category.

The data. Download the full dataset as a CSV file (242 rows: brand, campaign, date, market, category, maker, what the AI did, whether the upload tells viewers, and the source for each). You are free to use it with a link to this page.

We will correct any entry with a better source. If you made one of these films, or one we missed, write to us with a link to a public source and we will add it to the February 2027 edition.

The full list: 242 AI commercials, 2024 to 2026

Every campaign we counted, by region and year. The CSV version adds markets, categories, sources and dates.

US and Canada, 2024: 9 campaigns

US and Canada, 2025: 18 campaigns

US and Canada, 2026: 12 campaigns

Latin America: 23 campaigns

UK, Europe, Africa and global campaigns (1 of 2): 18 campaigns

UK, Europe, Africa and global campaigns (2 of 2): 18 campaigns

Middle East and Asia-Pacific, 2024: 9 campaigns

Middle East and Asia-Pacific, 2025: 19 campaigns

Middle East and Asia-Pacific, 2026: 6 campaigns

India, 2024: 16 campaigns

India, 2025 (1 of 3): 17 campaigns

India, 2025 (2 of 3): 17 campaigns

India, 2025 (3 of 3): 17 campaigns

India, 2026 (1 of 2): 22 campaigns

India, 2026 (2 of 2): 21 campaigns

Making an AI film people will want to watch?

Every campaign in this list made a choice about what to generate, what to shoot and what to tell the viewer. The ones people liked made those choices early and on purpose.

If you are weighing AI for a campaign, bring us the one scene everyone says can’t be done as a paid look-development and feasibility test, paste your script into our free script analyser for a producer’s read, or send us the brief and a named producer will tell you which shots to generate, which to shoot and how to label the result. See how we made the Air India film, and how AI commercials are made, stage by stage, in our production pipeline guide.

First December Films is an advertising film production company in Mumbai. Our work has won more than 150 international creative awards, including Cannes Lions, D&AD and One Show Gold Pencils.