There's a statistic that's been talked about for the better part of a decade: The average person is exposed to about 10,000 ads every day. This was always a little suspicious (and has since been proven wrong), as it means we're being shown an ad every six seconds while we're awake.
But perhaps the reason it's lasted so long is because it really feel truth.
Our feeds are flooded with ads. They're all over the airwaves, TV broadcasts, sports sidelines, team jerseys, and streamers. Now, with artificial intelligence, the statistic of 10,000 ads per day threatens to become a reality.
Agency Gene.ai created AI-generated ads for IM8, Popeyes, and Qatar Airways, as well as the viral Kalsi spot that aired during the NBA Finals. When the latest version of Sora was released in October, agency founder PJ Ace posted on X that “brands will have to create an ad every other day to stay relevant.”
kill me
Meanwhile, earlier this month, Philip Ho, founder of the aptly named AI video production company Absurd, said on the TBPN podcast that his company receives as many as 1,500 video requests a month from a single client.
Just light me on fire.
With all due respect to Ace and Ho, the version of commercial culture they're selling sounds like an AI-generated fever dream in which we all need to pluck out our own eyeballs with rusty shrimp forks. Even the laws are starting to agree.
Submerging a culture in a sea of sameness is not good for our eyes, nor is it a good investment for brands. If you look at the ads produced by Ace's company and compare them to McDonald's recent AI ad (which just aired in Europe) and Coke's AI holiday ad, they're all the same. . . atmosphere. All the people and scenes appear to be using the same filter. It feels strangely uniform. Now let's increase the number of ads by a factor of 10. Pure unfiltered nightmare fuel.
If every brand is pumping out new AI-generated ads every day, think about what real differentiation looks like. In 2026, brands will have to find new ways to leverage scarcity, anticipation, and fan communities to do so. You could call it a “less is more” approach, but I prefer the STFU brand strategy.
STFU brand strategy is not about being quiet, it's about being more strategic in both how and when you speak to your audience. Instead of AI breathing fire down people's throats every time they wake up, it's the pursuit of work and experience that can be communicated with enthusiasm.
Award-winning advertising agency Johannes Leonardo has been one of the best practitioners of the STFU brand strategy over the last year, through his work with brands such as Adidas and Oscar Mayer. Co-founder and Creative Chairman Leo Premtico believes strongly in the idea that differentiation comes in the form of interesting ideas shared by real people with other real people.
“There's no way that amount is the answer,” Premtico says. “This whole idea that the more crap the AI generates, the more the AI learns from it itself, it just snowballs into what are we looking at? What we need most is more volume. It has to be something else.”
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