The most important AI commercials of the last two years range from a $2,000 spot that aired during the NBA Finals to a Coca-Cola holiday ad that drew heavy backlash. Some were praised, some were called AI slop, and a few changed how brands think about production cost. This list covers 15 of them, how each one was made, which AI model produced it, and how people reacted. If you want to make your own, skip to how to make an AI commercial.
AI commercials fall into a few buckets. Some are fully AI-generated with tools like OpenAI’s Sora or Google’s Veo 3. Some use AI for part of the pipeline, like generating thousands of concept images or localizing one ad into many languages. And a few of the most talked-about ads came from AI companies themselves, made mostly by human artists. Here are the ones that mattered.
15 AI Commercials Worth Knowing
1. Coca-Cola: Holidays Are Coming
Coca-Cola remade its classic “Holidays Are Coming” spot with generative AI in 2024. Three AI studios, Secret Level, Silverside AI, and Wild Card, built it using several AI models. The ad drew heavy criticism online, with viewers calling it soulless and a poor replacement for the original that used real trucks and human crews. Coca-Cola defended it as a success and ran another AI holiday ad the following year, which reignited the same debate.
2. Toys R Us: The Origin Story
Toys R Us made one of the first brand films built with OpenAI’s Sora. Toys R Us Studios worked with the agency Native Foreign, and the film tells the origin story of founder Charles Lazarus and the brand mascot Geoffrey the Giraffe. It premiered at the 2024 Cannes Lions festival. The team went from concept to final in a few weeks using Sora, with some corrective visual effects and an original score added on top.
3. Kalshi: NBA Finals Ad
The Kalshi ad became the breakout example of what one person can do with AI video. Creator PJ Accetturo made it with Google’s Veo 3 for the prediction-market app Kalshi, and it aired during Game 3 of the 2025 NBA Finals. He generated between 300 and 400 clips and cut it down to about 15, finishing in roughly two days for around $2,000. It passed 3 million views within a week and became the go-to case study for low-cost AI advertising.
4. Progressive: Drive Like an Animal
Progressive ran an AI-generated ad featuring AI animals, including a talking llama voiced in the style of its mascot Flo. The reception was rough. Comment sections and forums filled with people calling it AI slop, saying it felt unsettling, and telling the brand to pay real actors. It is a useful reminder that AI production can save time and still cost you goodwill if the audience feels the humanity was stripped out. The ad reportedly performed well on engagement metrics even as sentiment ran negative, which shows how far apart those two numbers can sit.
5. Verizon: AI-Made Spot
Verizon and its brands have leaned into AI-generated creative. Its budget brand Visible produced an AI-made, anime-style video in-house in 2025, one of the clearer signals that telecom marketing teams are testing generative video for social and streaming placements. As with most brand AI ads, reactions were split between people impressed by the speed and people who could tell it was machine-made.
6. Airbnb: Is It Real or A.I.bnb?
Airbnb leaned into a stylized, animated, almost toy-like look for its recent ads, with miniature diorama scenes and a light how-to framing. The style lets the team ship many variations fast, and Airbnb put out a run of these spots into 2026. The output is polished enough that viewers openly debated whether the ads were AI-generated when they ran on streaming platforms like Netflix, and Airbnb has played with that question directly through an “Airbnb or A.I.bnb” concept that asks people to guess what is real. How much of the pipeline is generative AI versus traditional CG animation is still debated, which is part of why these ads got so much attention.
7. Liquid Death: The Spec Ad That Slapped
This Liquid Death ad was not commissioned by Liquid Death. A writing and directing duo, Noam Sharon and Tal Rosenthal, worked with creative director Amir Ariely to make it with Google’s Veo 3, as a tribute to the brand. It cost around $800 in Veo 3 credits and took about two weeks. Unlike the Coca-Cola and Progressive reactions, this one landed well, and it spread widely as proof of how far AI video quality had jumped in a year.
8. Trivago: One Ad, Many Languages
Trivago used AI in a more practical way. As part of a 2025 brand refresh, it filmed one master ad featuring Jürgen Klopp, then used AI to produce localized versions in more than ten languages with the same on-screen presenter. The goal was to cut production time and cost on localization rather than to generate the whole spot from scratch. Reactions to the AI face and voice work were mixed, but it showed a clear, useful use case for AI in a global campaign.
9. Under Armour: Forever Is Made Now
Under Armour released this AI-assisted spot with boxer Anthony Joshua in 2024, directed by Wes Walker with the studio Tool. Joshua was deep in fight camp and could not do a normal shoot, so the team combined AI video, AI photo, CGI, VFX, and 35mm footage, delivering in about four weeks. It also drew criticism, partly over reusing footage from past work without full credit. It is one of the clearest examples of a hybrid pipeline where AI fills gaps rather than making the whole ad.
10. Heinz: A.I. Ketchup
Heinz ran one of the smartest early AI campaigns. Agency Rethink asked the image model DALL-E 2 to draw “ketchup” in all sorts of scenarios, and the results kept looking like Heinz bottles. The point was simple: even AI thinks ketchup means Heinz. The campaign earned more than 850 million impressions worldwide and won a Clio Gold, and it holds up as an example of using AI to prove a brand idea rather than just to cut costs.
11. Google: Veo 3 Pixel Ads
Google used its own Veo 3 model in campaigns for the Pixel phone, including spots like “Vanilla” and the “Just Ask Google” series in 2025. The interesting part is the workflow: Google Creative Lab used Veo 3 to build detailed storyboards, then hired human directors to turn those into the finished ads. It is a middle path between fully AI-generated and fully traditional, and it hints at how big advertisers plan to fold AI into normal production.
12. Klarna: The AI CEO
Klarna has pushed AI harder than most brands, and in May 2025 it used an AI avatar of CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski to present its quarterly earnings, as reported by TechCrunch. The avatar delivered the highlights on video, with small tells like reduced blinking. Alongside AI-generated ads, it fits Klarna’s wider story of using AI across marketing and operations as it moved toward going public.
13. Nike: Travis Scott, Reimagined
Nike used AI as a creative tool rather than a shortcut in this Travis Scott spot directed by Gibson Hazard. The team generated more than 5,000 images in Midjourney during preproduction to shape the visual identity, then built the final ad with a hybrid workflow that leaned on traditional VFX. The creatives were clear that the finished spot came from real VFX craft on top of the AI exploration. It is a strong template for AI-enhanced, not AI-replaced, production.
14. Anthropic and OpenAI: The AI Labs Advertise
Anthropic launched its first brand campaign, “Keep Thinking With Claude,” in September 2025 through the agency Mother. The 90-second film was directed by Daniel Wolfe with music by MF DOOM, and it framed Claude as a thinking partner rather than a shortcut.
OpenAI ran “The Intelligence Age” during Super Bowl LIX in early 2025, made with Accenture Song and David Droga. Here is the twist: both flagship ads from the two biggest AI companies were built mostly by human artists, using a pointillism-style hand and 3D animation, with AI used only for early prototyping. When the AI labs advertise, they still hire human craft.
15. Liven: AI Ads at Scale
The self-discovery app Liven shows the other side of cheap AI video: volume. Liven has run AI-generated ads at scale across social feeds, and the ads have been widely criticized as low-quality and, in some coverage, as manipulative toward vulnerable viewers, alongside complaints about billing and cancellation. It is on this list not as a model to copy, but as a warning. AI makes it easy to flood feeds with ads, and quality and ethics still decide whether that helps or hurts the brand.
What These AI Commercials Have in Common
A few patterns show up across all fifteen.
- The cost drop is real. The Kalshi and Liquid Death ads cost a few thousand dollars or less and reached millions. That math is why founders and small brands are paying attention.
- Hybrid beats fully generated. The ads that landed best, like Nike and the Google Pixel spots, used AI for exploration and speed, then finished with human craft.
- Audiences can tell, and they care. Coca-Cola and Progressive show that a visibly AI ad can trigger backlash even when it performs on engagement metrics.
- Localization is a quiet win. Trivago used AI to turn one shoot into many markets, a low-risk use that most viewers never notice.
How to Make Your Own AI Commercial
You do not need a national brand budget to make an AI commercial. The same shift that produced the ads above lets a small store make a commercial-style spot from a single product photo.
Shhots AI is built for this. You upload a product photo, and the AI commercial generator writes the script, builds the scenes, and adds motion, music, and voiceover. You get a finished, commercial-style ad in about two minutes, with no prompting. The short version of the workflow:
- Upload one clear product photo, or paste a product page URL.
- Let the tool script the ad and build the scenes.
- Pick your platform sizing for TV, YouTube, Meta, or TikTok.
- Export watermark-free and run it.
For the ad-focused version, use the AI ad generator for paid social, or the AI product video generator for listing and product videos. For a wider tool comparison, see our best AI ad generator guide.
AI Commercials FAQ
What is the most famous AI commercial?
The most cited AI commercial is the Kalshi ad that aired during the 2025 NBA Finals. Creator PJ Accetturo made it with Google’s Veo 3 in about two days for roughly $2,000, and it passed 3 million views within a week. It became the standard example of how cheap and fast AI video advertising had become.
Which AI model makes commercials?
Brands most often use OpenAI’s Sora and Google’s Veo 3 for fully AI-generated video, Midjourney and DALL-E for image work, and avatar tools for talking-head spots. Toys R Us used Sora, Kalshi and Liquid Death used Veo 3, Nike used Midjourney, and Heinz used DALL-E 2. For ecommerce product commercials from a photo, purpose-built tools like Shhots AI handle the script, scenes, and voiceover in one step.
Why do people dislike some AI commercials?
The backlash usually comes when an ad looks visibly machine-made and replaces work people expected from human crews and actors. The Coca-Cola holiday ad and the Progressive animal ad both drew this reaction, with viewers calling them soulless. Ads that use AI for speed and exploration but keep human craft on top, like Nike’s, tend to avoid it.
How much does an AI commercial cost?
It ranges widely. The Kalshi ad cost about $2,000 and the Liquid Death spec ad about $800 in credits. Large brand productions that mix AI with traditional VFX still run into the usual six-figure ranges. For a small business, an ecommerce tool like the Shhots AI commercial generator starts at $19 a month.
Can a small brand make an AI commercial?
Yes. A small brand can make a commercial-style ad from a single product photo with a tool like Shhots AI, starting at $19 a month. You do not need footage, a studio, or a prompt. The ads on this list show the ceiling; tools like this show the floor is now very low.