If you wanted to find the people most relaxed about AI-generated advertising, you would probably start with 21-year-olds. They have never studied without it. They use it daily. Half their coursework involves negotiating with it in one way or another.
So it is worth sitting with what happens when you put the question to two of them directly.
A recent episode of the Marketing 4 Business podcast brought in two University of Canterbury marketing students. Between them they have built a marketing community of more than 750 members in six months, they use AI across their email, their research and their day jobs, and one of them runs paid social content for a car dealership. Not sceptics. Not late adopters. About as fluent as it gets.
Ask them what they make of AI-generated ads and the temperature drops immediately. They cannot stand them. They see them constantly. They can pick them instantly. And the word that came up, without prompting, was slop.
That should be uncomfortable reading for anyone signing off an AI-generated campaign on cost grounds, because the entire commercial case for AI creative quietly assumes younger audiences either will not notice or will not mind. The evidence points the other way. They notice first and mind most.
Fluency is not approval, it is detection
Here is the thing most people get backwards. The assumption is that comfort with AI runs along a generational line, and that the further down the age range you go the more accepting people become. It does not work like that.
Using a tool every day does not make you fond of its output. It makes you fast at recognising it.
If you have written a hundred prompts, you know what the default cadence sounds like. You know the shapes it reaches for. You have seen the same stock composition, the same slightly weightless lighting, the same faces that are almost but not quite specific. Heavy users are not the safe audience for AI creative. They are the early warning system.
And the tell has moved. It is no longer six fingers and melted hands. Most of that has been engineered out. What is left is harder to name and easier to feel, which is a flatness. A sameness. People cannot always articulate why they know, but they know, and the moment they know, the ad stops being about the product and starts being about the decision to make it that way.
What an AI ad actually says about a business
This is where it stops being a design preference and becomes a brand problem.
An AI-generated ad is not a neutral production choice. It is a message about the business that made it, and the message lands before the copy does. It says one of two things. Either the company did not think this was worth spending on, or it did not have anyone in the building worth putting on screen.
Neither is something a brand would choose to say out loud.
The part that makes this worse in New Zealand is who is doing it. The assumption is that AI creative is the small operator cutting a corner, working with no budget and no options. Increasingly it is not. It is larger companies, with marketing teams and media budgets, generating imagery they could easily have shot. When the resource argument does not apply, the judgement gets harsher.
The maths that does not add up
Which brings us to the argument that is genuinely hard to counter.
If a business is already paying to distribute an ad, the marginal cost of filming it with real people is small against the media spend. Not trivial, but small. A company putting serious money behind a campaign is saving a rounding error on production and paying for it in perception.
Milo put it plainly during the conversation. These brands are already paying to promote the ad. Going out and filming it with actual people, editing it themselves, is not the thing that breaks the budget. So the saving is real but tiny, and the cost is reputational and compounding.
That is a bad trade in any market. In a market the size of New Zealand, where customers and staff and staff's families all overlap, it is a worse one.
What real people in your advertising actually buy you
Think about Bunnings. Not the pricing, not the range, the advertising.
For years they have put their own people in it. Everyday staff, recognisably from the store you actually visit. It works because of something no production budget can substitute for, which is that some viewers know those people, or at least know people exactly like them. The day that becomes AI actors is the day something real is quietly deleted.
There is a second benefit here that almost nobody counts, and it is the reason our team keeps pushing clients towards it.
We have had clients put employees on their social channels for years. Small stuff. A staff member in a video, a team member in a Facebook post. What happens next is not a marketing outcome on any report. The person's family sees it. Their mates see it. They send it around. And something small but genuine shifts in how that person feels about where they work.
That is marketing money returning a culture result nobody budgeted for. Generated content returns nothing on that line, because there is nobody in it to feel anything about.
AI does not have conviction
The sharpest idea to come out of that episode was not really about creative at all.
Ask an AI what it thinks and it will largely hand your own framing back to you, dressed up. Push on it and it folds. It does not hold a position under pressure because it does not have one. It is agreeable by design.
Sit that next to a marketer with ten years of results behind them. In a strategy meeting, that person will tell a client they are wrong. They will look at the data, look at the plan, and say the idea will not work and here is why. That is not a small difference. For most clients, that is the entire value of the meeting.
The same thing shows up in creative work. Conviction is what makes an ad specific. It is what makes someone choose the awkward line over the safe one, or build the whole thing around a single strange detail that turns out to be the reason anyone remembers it. Without conviction you get output that is technically competent and completely forgettable, which in a full feed is the same thing as invisible.
Rore drew the line better than most corporate AI policies manage. Use it for the tasks. Do not use it for your critical thinking, because the human side of that can never go away.
Where AI-generated content genuinely earns its place
This is not an absolutist argument, and anyone making one should be treated with suspicion.
Our team has used AI-generated imagery for a client where the constraint was access. You cannot walk a film crew into a hospital ward on a whim. When the choice is generated content or no content, generated content is the right answer.
We have used it for a charity too. The alternative was repeated location shoots at a volume that would have consumed the money the campaign existed to raise. Spending donor funds on production in order to advertise for donor funds is a poor use of everyone's time.
Notice the pattern in both. AI content was a reasonable answer to a genuine constraint. It is a poor answer to a preference.
So here is the working rule we would give any New Zealand business right now. If a real person could plausibly appear in this, and you have chosen not to film them, stop and check whether you are solving a constraint or avoiding an effort. If it is the second one, the money is not being saved. The cost is being deferred onto the brand and paid later with interest.
The line this generation actually draws
It would be easy to read all this as young marketers being anti-technology. They are not, and the detail of how they use AI is more instructive than the complaint.
Both of them run it across their inboxes. Both use it for research. One uses it for scripts and hook ideas in his marketing job. They are working through free Google and Meta certifications, and they are running an AI workshop for their members specifically on using it responsibly for productivity, planning and research.
What they will not do is hand over the part that carries meaning. The thinking. The judgement. The voice.
That is a more sophisticated position than most businesses have written down, and it was arrived at by two people in their early twenties without a policy document in sight. Worth noting, given how many organisations are still stuck arguing about whether to allow AI at all rather than deciding where the line sits.
Rore and Milo's full conversation with Scott Wilson on AI in creative work, marketing careers and building a 750-member community is on the Marketing 4 Business podcast.
Want the full conversation? Listen to "Hiring Young Marketers: What They Cost, What They Want, and Why They Can Spot Your AI Ads" with Rore and Milo from the UC Marketing Society on the Marketing 4 Business podcast, available on your favourite podcast streaming service, or watch it now on YouTube.
