There’s a statistic that’s been making the rounds for the better part of a decade that says the average person is exposed to about 10,000 ads every day. This has always sounded a tad suspect, as it amounts to an ad every six seconds of our waking day (it has since been debunked).
But maybe the reason it’s persisted this long is because it really feels true.
Our feeds are saturated with ads. The airwaves, TV broadcasts, sports sidelines, team jerseys, and our streamers are full of them. Now artificial intelligence is threatening to make that 10,000 ads a day statistic a reality.
Agency Genre.ai has made AI-generated ads for IM8, Popeye’s, and Qatar Airlines, as well as the viral Kalshi spot that aired during the NBA Finals. When Sora’s latest version dropped back in October, agency founder PJ Ace posted on X, “Brands will need to make an ad every other day to stay relevant.”
Kill me.
Meanwhile, earlier this month, Philip Ho, the founder of the appropriately named AI video production company Absurd, told the TBPN podcast that his company is getting asked for as many as 1,500 videos a month from single clients.
Just set me on fire.
All due respect to Ace and Ho, but the version of commercial culture they’re selling sounds like an AI-generated fever dream in which we’re all forced to remove our own eyeballs with rusty shrimp forks. Even legislation is starting to agree.
Drowning culture in a sea of sameness isn’t good for our eyeballs, nor is it a good investment for brands. If you watch the ads Ace’s company has produced, and compare them to McDonald’s’ recent AI ad (which just got pulled off the air in Europe), or even Coke’s AI holiday ads, they all have that same . . . vibe. The people and scenes all appear to be using the same filter. It feels oddly homogenous. Now take that and increase the number of ads by tenfold. Pure unfiltered nightmare fuel.
If every brand is pumping out a new AI-generated ad every single day, let’s consider what actual differentiation looks like. In 2026, brands should be finding new ways to utilize scarcity, anticipation, and fandom communities to that end. You could call it the less is more approach, but I prefer the STFU Brand Strategy.
The STFU Brand Strategy isn’t about being quiet, it’s about being more strategic in both how and when you talk to your audience. It is the pursuit of work or experiences that are enthusiastically passed around, as opposed to having AI slop fire-hosed down people’s throats every waking moment.
Award-winning ad agency Johannes Leonardo was one of the best practitioners of the STFU brand strategy this past year through its work for brands like Adidas and Oscar Mayer. Cofounder and creative chairman Leo Premutico is a firm believer in the idea that differentiation will come in the form of interesting ideas that real people share with other real people.
“There’s no way that volume is the answer,” says Premutico. “This whole idea that the more AI is generating crap that it is then itself learning from, is just going to snowball to the point where, what are we even looking at? The last thing we need is more quantity. It needs to be something else.”
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