My ad creative predictions for 2026

Hey guys,

Happy New Year!

As it’s the start of the new year, it’s only right that I make my annual ad predictions for the year.

I’ve been thinking a lot about about where ad creative is heading this year and we're at this weird inflection point where everything we know about making ads is about to change. AI is getting scary good, but at the same time, people are craving authenticity more than ever.

So I sat down and mapped out exactly what I think the ad creative landscape will look like 12 months from now. Some of these predictions are pretty bold, so I’m curious to get your take on how they pan out.

Strap in!

But first, here's what I've found interesting this week:

There’s been SO much that’s happened over the Christmas break that I’m actually going to be dedicating the entire next newsletter on resources/news you might’ve missed over the last few weeks - but here are some of the standouts :)

• BIG NEWS: Meta acquires Manus for $2B! This will have a huge impact on advertisers in 2026 and beyond. I thought this was a really good breakdown from Taylor Holday

• Instagram head Adam Mosseri wrote an interesting post on how AI will affect creators and social media in 2026 (hint hint: there are a lot transferable lessons for us advertisers)

• Cody Plofker dropped his ECom predictions here and Taylor Holiday dropped his here

Here’s my favourite ad that I’ve seen this week:

Not a new ad, but it was one that did the rounds on X a few months ago and I still think about it often - it's one of my favorite ever 'founder ads'. So simple yet so effective if you actually have a good product. There’s no reason why every person reading this can't go and shoot something this today.

My 10 predictions for ad creative in 2026

1) For the first time ever, AI ads become indistinguishable from human ads

Production isn’t the constraint anymore. Creative strategy as we know it dies. The best creative teams won’t be ‘strategising’, they’ll be building the systems that decide what to make…and then make them at scale.

2) The ads that win will either be…

Ad creative that wins is either:

a) super ugly and disguised as an organic piece of content

or

b) super obvious that it’s an ad, but the direct response storytelling is so good, people don’t care.

Getting caught in the middle ground is ad account suicide and will make it incredibly difficult to scale.

3) It’s not AI OR humans

It’s not AI OR human creators, it’s AI AND human creators. Brands know that relying purely on AI comes with brand risk, user fatigue toward AI, and governance issues. The best companies will use humans for authenticity and trust, and AI for scale.

4) People will crave authenticity

A few things I’m bullish on at ad level: founder ads, authority figures, working with actual top content creators (not UGC talking head creators), whitelisting, yappers, any form of ugly ads. Basically anything that signals trust and authenticity. In a feed full of AI slop, people will crave it.

5) Paid social roles continue to collapse

Paid social roles continue collapsing into each other. We’re already seeing this with the media buyer and strategist roles. I think creator coordination, editing, and design come next. Fewer people on the account, less time executing and more time orchestrating the AI pipeline.

6) Google takes over as the leading AI tool suite for advertisers

Nano Banana is the best at image gen, Veo isn’t far behind Sora in video gen and Gemini is the only model that can analyze video (still massively underrated by the Ecom space btw). I’m already starting to see Gemini’s copywriting get better too. It’s not better than Claude yet, but it wouldn’t surprise me to see it overtake Claude in 2026.

7) Legislation difficulty

No concrete legislation gets put in place to automatically flag AI generated ads to users, even though it really should be.

8) AI will edit ads for us

Probably my most ambitious prediction: at some point, someone will crack AI editing. I.e. upload all of your footage to a folder and it turns them into ads for you (like Icon originally tried to do). I don’t see this happening until at least Q3 next year, but whoever does crack will have a heck of a business if the ads are good.

9) Meta’s generative AI will get good

They’re sinking too much resource into it for it not to - and to be fair, it’s already getting better. I see it being strong at making more of the stuff that’s working, but struggling to find big unlocks without hooking up to external data sources (customer reviews, TikTok, Reddit etc) - which I don’t see Meta doing. It’ll be useful to supplement, but not to rely on.

10) AI starts working for you

2025 taught everyone how to use AI. 2026 is when AI starts working for you. Agents will proactively read customer reviews, scroll feeds, analyze competitors, and decide what to make next - with humans stepping in only to override or refine. I see multiple tools potentially taking this path (think Motion, Triple Whale, AdNova…) and it will fundamentally shift ad creation towards AI doing the work and humans handling quality control.

What do you think AI will look like next year? I’d be curious to find out your predictions, reply to this email and let me know your thoughts!

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See you next week,

Alex