Do AI video ads work?
the evidence is mixed

Do AI video ads work?

Not proven either way. None of the studies we found measured real sales from AI and human-made video ads side by side. There is one lab test with predicted effects, one click test of a different kind, one brain study and one social media analysis, and they point in different directions:

What did the Ipsos test find?

Ipsos and Syracuse University took 10 real 30-second ads. Google’s Gemini worked out the brief behind each one and wrote a new shot list, and OpenAI’s Sora 2 made “a fully AI-produced spot with no human creative intervention.”

On average, the human-made ads scored 14% higher on Ipsos’s Creative Effect Index, which “captures an ad’s ability to drive short-term sales impact”, and 17% higher on its long-term brand measure. These are predictions from Ipsos’s model. Syracuse University puts it the same way: human ads “are predicted to drive stronger short-term sales impact.”

The average hides a split. Co-author Adam Peruta told MediaPost that “the AI ads for Febreze and Herbal Essences outperformed human-made ads.” In the same interview the Cheerios AI ad is put at 155 in creative effect against 148 for the human one, “a difference of only seven points,” Peruta says. Ipsos found AI did best on “product-driven, direct” ads, and Peruta says that where the brief asked for “a human truth or use humor, AI came up short.”

Can people tell an ad is AI?

The studies disagree. Ipsos says only 25% of viewers who saw an AI ad were at least somewhat confident it was AI-made; Syracuse University’s release on the same study gives 13%. NielsenIQ’s 2024 study found the opposite: people identified most of its AI ads as AI-generated, “spontaneously and without prompting”. The two tests used different ads, in 2024 and 2026.

Do AI ads hurt the brand?

Again, both ways. NielsenIQ found “consumers reported feeling less positive toward the brands of all AI-generated ads”. In the Ipsos study, Peruta says people were told the ad they saw was AI and asked whether that changed how they felt about the brand: “54% said no”. Meltwater found that at the 2026 Super Bowl, “AI-focused ads generated disproportionate negativity on social media.”

What does the MIT test show?

That a personalised AI video beat an image ad and a generic video on clicks, once, in one setting. MIT researchers sent over 21,000 customers of an Indian online retailer of eco-friendly products one of three WhatsApp ads: a personalised AI avatar video, a personalised image ad or a generic video. The AI video got 9.4% more clicks than the image ad and 6.5% more than the generic video. It did not compare AI with human-made ads, and the researchers ask whether the lift came from personalisation “or the novelty of the tech?”

What do advertisers report?

Only scattered first-hand reports, each from one person:

• One ecommerce practitioner says AI creator-style ads still convert “15-30% behind real creators” in their tests.
• One advertiser in a June 2026 thread saw AI ad conversion rates “dropping off after few months” and went back to real creators. Another commenter there wrote: “AI for testing, real creators for scaling.”
• One commenter in the r/ecommerce thread said: “When a business uses ai, I assume they don’t have a marketing budget”.

What does this mean for your ads?

Only what the sources say. Ipsos found AI did best on product-led, direct ads. Peruta’s hypothesis for the Cheerios result is that “Cheerios had a very strong brief, very clear, backed by research.” His advice: “If you are testing AI in your creative and the ads are testing well, then I would certainly lean into it.” And check whether the platform needs an AI label.

If you want ads made by a person to test against your own, our creators make them from $450 an ad.