Ads don’t care who made them, just how good they are 

Gurugram, July 28: The advertising industry has spent two years fretting over whether artificial intelligence would eat creative jobs or save them. A new study from VDO.AI suggests both camps may be asking the wrong question. What matters, it turns out, is not who or what made the ad, but whether it lands.

The global ad-tech platform crunched data from around 200 campaigns, pitting AI-generated creatives against traditionally made ones across connected TV (CTV), online video (OLV) and rich-media display. The scorecard was strikingly close. On CTV, AI-made ads notched a video completion rate (VCR) of 92 per cent against 90 per cent for their human-made counterparts. On OLV, AI ads managed 71 per cent versus 70 per cent. On rich-media display, the two were indistinguishable, both averaging a click-through rate (CTR) of 0.30 per cent.

The gap, in other words, is a rounding error. And that is the real story. As AI tools become cheaper and more ubiquitous, they stop being a competitive edge and start being table stakes. What actually separates a memorable campaign from a forgettable one, the study argues, is the format’s ability to hold attention, how relevant the message is to the viewer, and the overall user experience, not the software used to knock it together.

Arjit Sachdeva, co-founder of VDO.AI, put it bluntly: AI has become integral to how ads are made, but it does not change how a creative performs. The study, developed with inputs from the Great Lakes Institute of Management, was designed precisely to test that assumption against real campaign data rather than industry folklore. His conclusion is that audiences do not engage with an ad because of its provenance; they engage when it feels timely, relevant and immersive. The winning formula, he suggests, still pairs technology with human creative instinct and strong formats.

Academics are already recalibrating what that means for the next generation of marketers. Amit Kumar, associate professor and area chair, marketing, at Great Lakes Institute of Management, Gurugram, argues that the marketers who thrive will not be the ones resisting AI but those who direct it with sharper strategic intent. Creative judgement, in his view, is climbing the value chain rather than being automated out of it. Humans supply the brand truth; AI merely helps express it more engagingly. For consumers, he reckons, that should mean fewer irrelevant interruptions and more messages that actually meet them in the moment, strategy staying human even as execution turns hybrid.

Notably, the pattern held up across sectors, automotive, consumer durables, FinTech, CPG and lifestyle all showed similar engagement trends, lending the findings a cross-sector consistency that is hard to dismiss as a fluke of one category. VDO.AI‘s takeaway is that AI-assisted creatives can now deliver performance on par with human-made ones across CTV, OLV and rich-media environments alike.

None of this settles the bigger argument about AI’s role in the creative economy. But it does puncture a common assumption, that slapping an “AI-generated” label on a creative is either a shortcut to success or a mark of inferior craft. The data says neither. Origin, it seems, is overrated. Execution is not.