89. Apocalypse Now (for half of you)
2026 predictions: The boring will prosper. The fake will burn alive. There is no middle ground.
The Ad Stack is now ranked #7 in the Satire category and # 8 in AI per Inbox Reads.
Dribs and Drabs
I’m hearing creatives have moved on from providing paper edits to providing rough cuts in Descript themselves which goes on into final edit by a grownup with bigger editing software. Descript is AI-driven. In theory you type prompts of what you want and voila! You don’t need to know where any of the “editing buttons” are.
Descript sucks. It’s punching above it’s weight just to do the aforementioned. They’ll sort it out because we need AI shoved into everything. In my experience it’s pre-beta.
Also heard client request of “Fast is better than good and lower production value is fine.”
Are they discussing marketing or manufacturing?
The 2026 AI Advertising Headlines
An Earnest Attempt to Reintroduce Cause and Effect
In 2026, advertising will finally admit that AI did not make us smarter. It just made us faster at doing the same bad ideas, everywhere, all at once.
Every brand will claim its AI is ethical. This will be based on vibes. Somewhere, a PDF will exist. No one will open it. The AI will still recommend a sympathy ad next to a true crime podcast, but the press release will say “responsibly.”
AI will be declared culturally fluent. It will misuse slang with confidence. It will explain memes long after they are dead. It will surface insights like “people enjoy feeling seen,” and agencies will nod as if this was discovered through computation rather than basic observation.
Purpose will be automated. Campaigns will feature algorithmically generated diversity, tasteful melancholy, and copy that suggests progress without naming any. The case study will claim impact.
via Nano Banana Pro The outcome will be a banner ad.
At least one brand will need an AI apology tour. The mistake will happen globally in seconds. The apology will also be written by AI. It will say “We are listening” while changing nothing
via Nano Banana Pro Synthetic influencers will demand authenticity from real humans. They will post raw content that took days to render. Comments will be turned off to protect the conversation.
Junior roles will vanish. Senior leaders will mourn the loss of “craft” while asking the AI for ten more decks before lunch.
Real people will become a premium feature. Campaigns will brag about using humans the way menus brag about free range eggs. Finance will ask if the humans are necessary.
AI will analyze billions of data points and conclude that people like ease, clarity, and not being annoyed. This will be positioned as revolutionary.
via ChatGPT An award will be won for prompting. The work will look familiar. The write-up will not. The final master edit is seven seconds in length. The director’s cut ups it to 10.
By the end of 2026, the most radical brand move will be having a clearly labeled button that actually connects to a person. It will be hidden. It will still be routed through AI first.
2026 Predictions: Go Bifurcate Yourself
The Year AI Marketing Splits Into “Boring” and “Nightmare Fuel”
Here are some thoughts for 2025/2026, because if you’re not planning for this split, you’re already behind.
1. Target Uses Trillion-Dollar Alien Intelligence to … Read a Toddler’s Handwriting.
On November 12, Target released List Scanner. You photograph your Christmas list or child’s unholy crayon summoning ritual to Santa, and Target turns it into a shopping cart. No music swell. No brand manifesto. No gentle voice assuring you that capitalism understands your feelings.
Just problem, solution, money.
“When they use the Target app in-store, their basket sizes are nearly 50% higher,” said Target’s chief guest experience officer. Translation: boring AI that removes friction prints cash.
This is the Boring Track. AI that keeps its head down, does the job, and does not ask to be loved. Consumers are fine with this. Delighted, even. That is, if they notice it. What they do not want is AI pretending to be their buddy, therapist, or seasonal memory curator.
The 2026 prediction writes itself. The next big agency retainer is not for content. It is for infrastructure. Logistics bots. Checkout fixes. Inventory intelligence. The creative brief shifts from “Make us cry during the Super Bowl” to “Why are people abandoning carts at step three.”
Half the creatives reading this are about to learn their new title is “UX friction diagnostician.” Congratulations on the promotion.
2. The Uncanny Valley Becomes a Mass Grave
Then we have the other track. The one that a marketer drove into like a drunk tourist on a Vespa. “Nightmare Fuel.”
The AI remake of memorable commercials should be taught in business schools as a masterclass in misunderstanding your own brand equity. This story has been chewed plenty. Briefly, a beloved commercial, something that worked because it was real humans creating shared memory was run through an AI pipeline that made people appear re-animated.
The technology wasn’t ready. It is still not ready. It may never be ready. HOWEVER, if they tossed $ my way I would have jumped at the opportunity too. Probably would have done it for free and delivered a Post-It reading “Never mind.” No win scenario.
Meanwhile, despite 61% positive sentiment in some surveys, the fact that the discourse around your Christmas ad brought forth measurable negativity suggests you might have missed the assignment. Boycott seems a bit extreme to me.
McDonald’s in The Netherlands hit this brick wall a year later for different reasons. It’s AI. Period. The creative also nixed but I rather enjoyed it. But this one followed recommendations of our next example. It worked due to lack of human warmth - and plenty of it.
Here’s the rule for 2026 that agencies are learning the hard way: You cannot use AI to simulate human warmth. It doesn’t work. Stop trying. AI excels at weird sh*t. Which brings us to ….
3. When The Weird Sh*t Works: The Kalshi Exception
Kalshi understood the assignment.
Their NBA Finals ad featured a farmer floating in eggs, an alien pounding beers, a pot-bellied man holding a Chihuahua, and a runaway bride escaping cops on a golf cart. It cost two thousand dollars. It took two days. It was made entirely with AI.
Traditional Finals ads cost hundreds of thousands, months of meetings, and weeks of congratulatory LinkedIn posts. Kalshi got eighteen million impressions in forty-eight hours, and the line “The world’s gone mad, trade it” landed because the ad looked exactly like a world that had gone mad.
They did not pretend it was real. They made it surreal. The glitch was the point.
Here are the new laws of Gen AI physics:
If you need trust, warmth, or sincerity, use humans and cameras.
If you need chaos, dream logic, or impossible visuals in a cozy fever dream, use AI and lean in. Hard.
The middle ground, where AI tries to pass as a normal TV spot, is a mass casualty event.
4. The Agentic Nightmare (For Agencies)
The bigger shift is not what AI makes. It is what AI does.
In 2025, agencies used AI to generate things. In 2026, AI executes workflows. End to end. Autonomously. No coffee. No paid dental. No awkward feedback sessions.
If you are billing twenty hours to resize five hundred banners, that work now takes ten minutes and an agent prompt.
The billable hour model for junior labor just got gently escorted behind the barn.
Agencies will pivot to selling systems instead of hours. This sounds visionary until you remember that much of agency leadership still thinks AI means asking ChatGPT to spice up a headline.
Most marketers plan to rely more heavily on AI. They already know the trade-off. Volume goes up. Nuance disappears. Everyone pretends this is fine.
Additional Predictions, Because Of Course
Several major brands will get caught using AI versions of real people without proper disclosure. Fashion and beauty will lead the charge. The lawsuits will be magnificent.
A full AI customer service stack will hallucinate the same wrong answer at scale. It will trend. The CEO will apologize. The bots will remain.
Holding companies will announce “AI transformations” that look suspiciously like layoffs. They will call it future-proofing. Wall Street will clap. The work will suffer.
At least one agency will rename production as “Agentic Solutions.” Same people. Same work. Worse titles.
“AI Skeptic” will become a real brand position. A smart marketer will sell the idea of human-made products. It will work better than anyone wants to admit.
One brand’s AI holiday ad will outperform their human one and cause a quiet C-suite meltdown. They will double down on AI the following year.
The Bottom Line
AI is splitting into two species. One is boring and useful and quietly profitable. The other is surreal and chaotic and honest about what it is.
The danger lives in the middle. The fake real. The synthetic warmth. The slop that wants applause for approximating humanity.
Target built a scanner and made more money. Kalshi spent two grand and embraced madness.
So when you plan for 2026, pick a lane. Build boring infrastructure or create a fever dream. If you try to do both, you are not innovating. You are just manufacturing a nightmare.
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Sources:
Target Launches New AI-Powered Features - Corporate Target
Coca-Cola’s 2025 AI Holiday Ad Backlash - CNN Business
Coca-Cola keeps pushing limits of generative AI despite backlash - Marketing Dive
Coca-Cola’s AI Christmas ad sparks backlash (again) - Euronews
An AI video ad is making a splash - NPR
Kalshi’s $2K NBA Finals AI Ad - DesignRush
Coca Cola’s 2025 AI Holiday Campaign - Finance Monthly
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I had to walk away in the middle of reading this because it's very, very real - and heartbreaking, as pointed out with "for half of you" (which will continue to increase). Spot on as per usual with one new development for you. Related to your first Additional Prediction, NY may have cut you off at the pass:
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/brianheidelberger_new-york-passes-first-of-its-kind-ai-disclosure-activity-7406326895228764162--9yM/