12 entries on the record in marketing & creative — 7 deployments, 4 pieces of evidence of adoption, 1 regulation. Each one is traced to a named source and dated. Maintained continuously by the Industrial Research Unit; the record was last updated 14 Sep 2026.
Extreme Reach — 88% of agency and brand advertising professionals report using or piloting AI in creative production, nearly half daily, Extreme Reach's State of Ad Ops study of 400-plus US and UK professionals finds. Production and post-production dominate, led by visual effects and compositing (45%), then performance analysis and creative testing, and image creation, at 44% each.
Korea Fair Trade Commission — The Korea Fair Trade Commission's amended notice on substantiating labelling and advertising claims took effect on 3 September 2026, requiring prior substantiation for AI advertising claims and other new-technology claims about products. The extension for filing substantiation material shrinks from 30 days to 15, granted only on narrower grounds such as receivership, a merger, natural disaster or seized records. Firms failing to file can be ordered to pull the advertisement.
Bahari — Bahari posted Facebook images for the Coral World collection on 31 May built around AI-generated models, not photographed people. Shoppers pushed back, saying a label built on island culture should have booked real faces. General manager Carole Barnett replied that campaigns have leaned on local talent since 2014, and that AI fashion imagery suited this shoot because Coral World itself has closed.
Kontuur Leo Burnett — Every frame of "Must nimekiri", the campaign telling shoppers to check the Consumer Protection and Technical Regulatory Authority's register of traders who breached consumer rights, was an AI advertising production — television spot and digital placements alike. Urmas Villmann, the advertising entrepreneur behind it, told "Reedene intervjuu" the approach improves quality and cuts cost at once, one agency designer now specialising in prompting. Work once meaning film shoots billed in tens of thousands happens at a desk, though generative ad creation is no shortcut: coaxing a usable result from a prompt eats days, like a photo session.
Google has put its Veo video model into Google Ads' Asset Studio and Demand Gen campaigns, letting advertisers make video ads of up to ten seconds from up to three images without leaving the ad console. Rolled out in March 2026 with Google's Nano Banana image tool, it brings AI-generated video creative into the ad-buying platform.
New York's Synthetic Performer Law, in force from 9 June 2026, makes advertisers and agencies conspicuously disclose knowingly using an AI-generated 'synthetic performer', a computer-made figure resembling no real person, in ads. Fines are $1,000 for a first violation and $5,000 after. Among the first US labelling rules for AI ad creative, it matches SAG-AFTRA's 2025 limits on synthetic performers.
A consumer backlash against AI-generated advertising has set in: Heineken, Polaroid and Cadbury market their work as 'human-made', and Apple added a 'Made by Humans' credit to its series Pluribus. H&M and Guess drew criticism for AI-created brand ambassadors. Authenticity worries now run so deep that major brands advertise not using AI.
Meta aims to make advertising fully end-to-end AI-generated by the end of 2026: an advertiser would give only a budget and a product image, and Meta's AI would create the imagery, video and copy, target across Facebook and Instagram, allocate spend and personalise each ad in real time. Chief executive Mark Zuckerberg set out the goal; the full system is not yet deployed.
US 'AI advertising' spending, ads around AI-powered results like Google's AI Overviews and chatbots, is forecast to more than double from US$32.03 billion in 2026 to US$68.25 billion in 2030 (about 2.1x). Over 80% goes beside AI content; in-chatbot ads stay under US$1 billion in 2026, reaching about US$5 billion by 2030.
89% of B2B marketers use AI to write marketing copy and 95% say their organisation uses AI-powered applications, in CMI/MarketingProfs' 2026 research (fieldwork mid-2025, n=1,015), against 81% team gen-AI use a year before. The wording moved from 'teams use generative AI' to 'org uses AI apps'; the 89% copy figure is the nearest like-for-like.
Nearly 90% of marketers report using generative AI at work. A September 2024 survey polled over 1,000.
Swedish fintech Klarna says an internal Copy Assistant writes about 80 per cent of its marketing copy, alongside generative-AI image tools such as Midjourney, DALL-E and Adobe Firefly. In May 2024 it reported image-production costs down around $6 million and the image cycle cut to seven days from six weeks, crediting AI with roughly $10 million in yearly marketing savings and 25 per cent less external agency spend. Later cutbacks to its AI customer-service agents left marketing untouched, and these figures were never retracted.
United States
South Korea
Bahamas
Estonia
Sweden