AI-Generated Ad Debuts During NBA Finals, Sparking Debate on Future of Advertising

Here's the $2,000 fully AI-generated ad that aired during the NBA Finals

Emma Roth is a news writer who covers the streaming wars, consumer tech, crypto, social media, and much more. Previously, she was a writer and editor at MUO. If you've been on social media lately, you might've seen the unsettling AI slop videos showing AI-generated people in wild scenarios or just speaking a bunch of nonsense. On Wednesday night, the betting platform Kalshi decided to take this trend outside the social sphere by putting a nonsensical AI-generated ad in front of the millions of viewers watching the NBA Finals -- and it apparently cost just $2,000 to make. The AI-generated highlights various things "people" are betting on, like whether the Oklahoma City Thunder or Indiana Pacers will win the NBA Finals, how many hurricanes will occur this year, and whether the price of eggs will go up this month. It flashes between scenes of an elderly man wearing a cowboy hat while carrying a chihuahua, someone swimming in a pool of eggs, and an alien chugging beer. In a post on X, PJ Accetturo, who identifies himself as an "AI Filmmaker," says Kalshi hired him to create the ad using Google's text-to-video generator Veo 3. (My colleague Allison Johnson recently called Veo 3 "a slop monger's dream.") "This took about 300-400 generations to get 15 usable clips," Acetturo writes. "One person, 2-3 days. That's a 95% cost reduction vs traditional ads." Accetturo outlines his process for creating the ad, which he says involved writing a script and then asking Gemini to generate a shot list with prompts for Veo 3. "I always tell it to return 5 prompts at a time -- any more than that and the quality starts to slip," Accetturo writes. After generating the prompts, Accetturo says he pastes them into Veo 3 and puts together the ads using a video editing app like CapCut or Adobe Premiere Pro. It's only been weeks since the launch of Veo 3, and if we're already seeing AI-generated ads on TV, there's likely much more to come. There are already plenty of videos floating around social media that are hard to peg as AI, too, not to mention the AI tools companies like Amazon, Meta, and even Netflix want to give advertisers.

Google's Veo 3 AI Slopfest Just Reached New Heights

Apparently, Veo 3 is ready for prime-time TV whether you like it or not. Just when I thought I met my slop quota for the month, Google had to go ahead and pile on. With Veo 3, AI-generated video has reached a whole new and stupefying level. YouTube slop; video game slop; VR slop; app slopâ€"you name it. All of that slop, however interesting, disheartening, or inane, has been pretty low stakes, but apparently it's all pointed in one direction, and that's straight for prime time. On Thursday night, Veo 3 made its debut as a tool for AI advertising, becoming the engine behind this commercial for the financial services company Kalshi, which aired during the NBA finals. This isn't the first AI-generated adâ€"those have been happening for a little while now and were a pretty major theme at this past year's Super Bowlâ€"but it's certainly an ascension for Veo 3, which was just unveiled at Google's I/O conference last month. But just because AI ads aren't new doesn't mean the idea of video generation didn't simultaneously reach new heights and new lows. As you can see from the creator of the ad (or I guess prompter in this case), PJ Ace, the whole process was rife with Google AI, from ideation to generation. "Kalshi asked me to create a spot about people betting on various markets, including the NBA Finals," wrote Ace on X. "I said the best Veo 3 content is crazy people doing crazy things while showcasing your brand." After the initial ideaâ€"which was apparently a thematic mashup of GTA and Floridaâ€"Ace used a mixture of Gemini and ChatGPT to help write and devise the script, and then took those ideas and had Gemini literally write a prompt that he could feed into Veo 3. That's right, folks, he had AI prompt itself, and that's how a prime-time ad was born. The result looks about on par with what we've seen other people generating with Veo 3. The visuals themselves are realistic, but you'll notice that each scene in the ad is very short. That's because Veo 3 still has trouble with continuity. Even in Google's curated demos of its new video generation model last month, including this action schlock AI slopfest, things get weird when you try to stitch coherent scenes together. Though Google's AI filmmaking tool, Flow, is made for creating longer, coherent AI videos, allowing you to describe angles and characters and retain them across scenes, things still get wonky. The aforementioned action-oriented AI slopfest is full of strange scenes of a SWAT team shooting at nothing and jarring camera angle shifts that make the fact it was AI-generated pretty obvious. Ace says his ad took him all of two days to create and "300-400 generations," so clearly this isn't quite waving a magic wand-type technology yet. Though, as Ace points out, it did effectively kill a lot of jobs on what would have been a much bigger payroll. Ace estimates that the whole thing was about a "95 percent cost reduction" as opposed to "traditional ads." There's a lot to unpack here, and based on the limitations I just described above, I don't think we can herald Veo 3 in as the new, preferred method of advertising, but the job-killing potential for this type of technology is undoubtedly high. And if there's a way to cut costs, you can bet your ass that we'll see a lot more of this kind of AI slop in the near future.

The 'Most Unhinged' AI-Generated Gambling Ad Ran During the NBA Finals

Self-described "AI Filmmaker" PJ Ace was hired by gambling brand Kalshi to make what he describes as the "most unhinged" commercial possible and, perhaps unsurprisingly, Disney-owned ABC approved it and ran it during game three of the NBA Finals this week. PJ Ace has successfully created viral, attention-grabbing videos using AI. Earlier this month, he garnered millions of views by asking AI to generate a video that re-imagined Biblical figures as modern-day influencers. Kalshi, a gambling company that allows people to bet on basically anything, hired PJ Ace to make an ad to air during the NBA Finals with a two-day timeline. "Kalshi hit me up wanting a spot where people placed odds on wild markets during the NBA Finals," PJ Ace writes on Reddit. "I told them that the best way to use Veo 3 right now is to have crazy people doing crazy things while they highlight your brand. They love GTA VI. I grew up in Florida. This concept kind of wrote itself." PJ Ace says the commercial was created using Google's AI products, namely Gemini and Veo 3. "I asked their team if they'd put together a few dialogue bits they wanted to include, and I came up with 10 different crazy people in crazy situations for them to say those lines in," PJ Ace explains. "I co-write with Gemini -- asking it to pitch me ideas, then I take the best ones and shape them into a basic script." After the script was created, PJ Ace then asked Gemini to convert every shot into a detailed Veo 3 prompt, specifically asking it to return five prompts at a time as a maximum since he says that beyond that, the quality dips noticeably. PJ Ace says that creating this ad, which surely many viewers didn't realize was AI-generated, was significantly more affordable than traditional advertising, which appears to be his pitch to brands. "This took around 300-400 generations to get 15 usable clips. One person, two days. That's a 95% cost reduction compared to traditional advertising," he says. He calls AI-generated commercials like this one the future of advertising, as long as what is created is attention-grabbing and comedic. "Right now the most valuable skill in entertainment and advertising is comedy writing. If you can make people laugh, they'll watch the full ad, engage with it, and some of them will become customers," PJ Ace says. "Just because this was cheap doesn't mean anyone can do it. I've been a director 15+ years. Brands still will need to pay a premium for taste. The future is small teams making viral, brand-adjacent content weekly, getting 80 to 90 percent of the results for way less." While PJ Ace did not state exactly how much he was paid for this ad, he says that most of his productions "fall between $10k and $40k," adding that "it pays way better than I made doing live-action commercials because it's 10x the volume and I can work in my boxers."

The AI-generated ad that aired during the NBA finals took $2,000 and 2 days to make

Screenshot from AI-generated video. Credit: Kalshi / PJ Ace / YouTube AI-generated commercials are ready for primetime. If you watched the NBA finals on Wednesday, you may have seen an ad that features a shirtless elderly gentleman draped in an American flag, a farmer floating in an inflatable pool filled with eggs, an alien chugging a pitcher of beer, and a lady in a sparkly pink tracksuit driving a Zamboni. This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed. Once your eyes recovered from the unhinged scenes, you would be right in assuming that this ad was created using generative AI. What's more, the Kalshi AI ad only took $2,000 and two days to create, according to YouTuber and filmmaker PJ Ace, who created the commercial. The AI creation was an advertisement for Kalshi, a market where users can place real-money trades on real-world events. Obviously, since it aired during the basketball game, the ad's AI-generated characters shared (yelled) whether they wanted the Oklahoma City Thunder or Indiana Pacers to win the championship (Indiana currently leads 2-1 in the series). But it also showed AI characters betting on things like whether the price of eggs would go up, hence the inflatable pool. After posting the video on X, Kalshi confirmed that it was created using Veo 3, Google's latest AI video generator that also supports audio. Now that Veo 3 has been unleashed, the ability to create inexpensive and eye-catching videos is undeniably seductive to advertisers. Meta is going all in on AI-generated ads for its platforms and reportedly plans to fully automate ad creation by the end of next year, according to the Wall Street Journal. "We were not specifically looking for an AI video at first, but after getting quotes from production companies that were in the six or seven figure range with timelines that didn't fit our needs, we decided to experiment," a Kalshi spokesperson told Mashable. "We did want some outrageous scenes as that fit the ad's theme of the world going mad; another factor here is that Veo-3 has a clip length limit of 8 seconds, so it was going to need to be structured as a commercial that cut around to different scenes quickly." In a thread on X, Ace shared how he created the Kalshi AI ad. He said he was asked by Kalshi to "create a spot about people betting on various markets, including the NBA Finals" and decided to pursue this creative vision because "the best Veo 3 content is crazy people doing crazy things while showcasing your brand." And in a YouTube description of the video, Ace said, "Kalshi hired me to make the most unhinged NBA Finals commercial possible." He also predicted that "High-dopamine Veo 3 videos will be the ad trend of 2025." This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed. Ace wrote a rough script of wild characters and dialogue, with brainstorming help from Gemini and ChatGPT, then started prompting. All in all, Ace said it took him "300-400 generations to get 15 usable clips," resulting in a commercial that he says is 95 percent cheaper than traditional ads. The AI filmmaker, who has over 15 years of experience as a director, said that while this commercial was made inexpensively, some brands will still "pay a premium for taste." But the future of ads in his opinion, is "small teams making viral, brand-adjacent content weekly, getting 80 to 90 percent of the results for way less."