WSJ What’s News - How AI Is Reshaping the Advertising Industry

Episode Date: February 8, 2026

It’s Super Bowl Sunday, the biggest day of the year for football… and also for the advertising industry. One of the things that’s different this year is that artificial intelligence has found its way into the process of making an ad in ways both obvious and subtle. And this year’s Super Bowl will feature ads from AI giants like OpenAI and Anthropic as competition for name recognition ramps up. Host Alex Ossola speaks with Journal reporters Katie Deighton and Suzanne Vranica about what to expect from the ads at today’s game, and how AI will shape the industry into the future. Further Reading:  AI Is Accelerating Tech Giants’ Dominance of the Ad Market  Meta Overshadows Microsoft by Showing AI Payoff in Ad Business Coca-Cola Injects ‘Holidays Are Coming’ Ads With an Upgraded Dose of AI Anthropic Takes Aim at OpenAI’s ChatGPT in Super Bowl Ad Debut  OpenAI Set to Run Another Super Bowl Ad as Chatbot Competition Heats Up Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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This is What's News Sunday, the show where we tackle the big questions about the biggest stories in the news by reaching out to our colleagues across the newsroom to help explain what's happening in our world. On today's show, artificial intelligence is reshaping the advertising industry. We get into the visible and subtle ways AI is changing commercials and what it means now that AI companies themselves are getting in on the action. It's Super Bowl Sunday, which means it's the advertising industry's, well, Super Bowl. This year, 30 seconds of Super Bowl ad time costs more than $8 million for many companies. And that's just for the time. They can spend tens of millions more on making the ads themselves. So increasingly, companies are turning to artificial intelligence to cut the cost of making an ad. At the same time, AI companies themselves are getting into the advertising game too.

I sat down with WSJ journalist Katie Dayton and Suzanne Vernica, who cover advertising all year round, about what this year's game has in store and how the industry is changing. Katie, Suzanne, thanks for being here. Have you seen any of the ads ahead of this year's Super Bowl? And what are some of the big takeaways? Katie, let's start with you. Yeah, we have definitely seen the ads. We are getting this similar variety that we've had for the past few years. So a lot of tech brands in there, but also a lot of brands that people would probably think of as household names.

We've seen probably everything. There are a few surprises. Companies can spend up to $50 million just to create the spot. If you include CGI, celebrities, you're going to see tons of celebrities. And we've seen this as a trend for the last five years. So it sounds like some things are definitely going to be the same this year. But over the past year, at least, it seems like some. something's been shifting, right? The amount of AI in advertising seems like it's really having its moment.

So, Suzanne, I want to ask you a little bit about how AI companies themselves are getting in the Super Bowl this year. Every year there's a big category that comes out, and this year it's going to be the AI Bowl, definitely. You've got Anthropic that's making their Super Bowl debut. Open AI is expected to air a spot. Microsoft is going to be pushing co-pilot, so that's a lot. Is it new that these companies are getting in on advertising like this? Over the last two years, there's basically been an ad battle that's starting to form. They're pouring billions of dollars into creating these companies, and now there's a death match going on for users, because they have to make sure that users know which chatbot. Do you like chat chippy T, do you like Claude?

And so it's name recognition, and there's nothing better for name recognition in today's world than the Super Bowl Sunday. You're going to get 100 million viewers typically, and you can look back in history, and companies have launched successfully year after year on the Super Bowl. Do the ads have to be good? The ads have to really be good because there's so many competing for attention, right? And so if they're not good, you're going to get negative stories the next day or worse, no one's even going to remember them. So there's a big competition on who's going to be the most creative. and that's why you see lots of companies putting multiple celebrities, hoping that helps them stick out.

And for these AI companies, are they using AI to make their ads? They are not in most cases. What they're using AI for is like the research or to brief their agencies or some of the grunt work that happens. Obviously, we've seen lots of companies put AI creative out there. And it doesn't look great in many cases. That's the future. There's no doubt.

But right now people are using it on the back end more than the front end. and I think Super Bowl, no one wants to risk the millions of dollars that it costs with people being upset about what it looks like. When we've seen companies use AI to produce their ads so far, they're making such a big deal about it, saying, hey, look at this ad. Doesn't that make us look like we're really on the cutting edge? I think when you stack ads up one after the other, like it is in the Super Bowl, everyone's very well aware of maybe it doesn't look so good. if you have Yorgas Anthemos directing a beautiful black and white spot starring Emma Stone and then right afterwards you put something AI produced, it's going to be really clear that it's not quite holding up creatively.

Katie, why are companies turning to AI to make ads in the first place? Cost is pretty much it. The amount of money it does take to produce a 30-second ad is a lot. The location, the actors, the amount of times they have to rerun the same line. the catering, all of that adds up in a way that it adds up for a Hollywood production. If a agency can come along and go, you know what, we're just going to do that on a computer. They can save so much money. Anything that can demonstrate at the moment to shareholders that a company knows what it's doing, I think it's a good investment.

But even companies that I think of that spend a lot of money on advertising, like Coca-Cola, they're doing this. And Katie, I'm wondering, is this actually effective to make an ad with AI? Like, do people like it? It depends who you ask. Everyone who thinks of themselves as a little bit creative hates this. And I'm 100% certain that's going to change soon. And we are not as smart as we think we are. And we are going to be seeing things that are AI.

And we don't realize it very soon. With the Coca-Cola ad that came out at Christmas time, it actually tested very well with normal audiences. However, it's very important to point out it was using creative that we've all seen before. We're nostalgic. and it's got that music, it had the holidays of coming music. So up until now, I think it can be used to remind people of ads that have come before. We haven't really seen AI ads that have done something like completely original that people have loved yet.

And in the Super Bowl, one of the advertisers that is doing what they are calling the first predominantly AI generated ad this year, which is the vodka brand Svedker, they're using a character which is a Fembot robot, which has exactly. which has existed already. They're just putting that into an AI generator and getting it to produce an ad around that. So, again, it's an example of a trope that's already been used. The audiences may say that they like, but we'll see if AI can produce something really captivating emotionally

that's completely brand new. Coming up, it's not just the visuals. AI is making its way into the entire process of creating an ad. We get into it after the break. Nearly home. Isn't home where we all want to be? Reba here for Realtor.com, the pro's number one most trusted app. A dream home isn't a dream home if it comes with a nightmare commute.

That's why realter.com has real commute, so you can search by drive time. Download the realter.com app today because you're nearly home. Make it real with realter.com. Pro's number one most trusted app based on August 2025 proprietary survey. Companies are playing up their use of AI right now and they're making it very obvious. But is there anything that says they have to indicate that something was made by AI? There's no law in terms of what they have to say, but there are self-regulatory standards. Like when you do an ad, you have to be honest and you can't make claims.

But if you think about AI, there are legal ramifications because if you're a beauty brand and your person that you're showing with the hair is done with AI, then that's actually a false claim in many lawyers that I've spoken to's opinion. The conversations that are happening at the tops of these companies to figure out as we move into this and we use it, what are the legal ramifications? Where can we get into trouble? And that's what's happening right now before this thing really takes off. Besides making the actual visuals with AI, how else is AI making it sort of? way into the process of creating an advertisement. When you set out to do an ad, you want to brief all the constituents. You want to put out a brief that says, this is what I'm looking for.

You've got AI doing all of that grunt work right now. You've got AI doing production work. We used to have story boards. Now you can get AI to basically create an ad. It's not going to run on air, but it's something that you can present to a client or you can get a feel for and you can tweak it and then really film it. So it's that under-border. belly that it's playing right now, but this technology is improving so quickly. There are companies

like Mondalys and others that have spent the last two years feeding these bots, all of their old advertising, all of their brand books and positioning so that these things get smarter. And those are the companies, when they decide to turn it on and say, go create an ad, you're not going to be able to tell the difference between what's now called AI Slop and what looks like a perfectly created spot. We're a little bit away from that at this point, but we're going to get there. It also goes back as far as audience research, something that has been the bread and butter of creative agencies, the strategy, the we spoke to all these people and they told us, they thought this about your product, they can now do these things called artificial audiences where they can

replicate what a real audience might be thinking. So they can be testing ads not on real people, but on a good assimilation of real people, and that, again, saves so much time and money. So it's really going to change everything. Yeah. Do you have a sense of what it will mean to work in advertising in a world of AI? I think we're already seeing the fallout. We've seen a massive consolidation at the holding company level, the companies that own all these agencies, they're contracting at a rapid clip. Creativity, in terms of that part of the business, had already been in a contracting stage. marketers weren't paying enough for that service because there was a glut of the agencies out there. So you've already seen a contraction. You're going to see lots of layoffs. We're already

seeing some of this. People will call this an AI-led thing. The problems had existed, AI is just going to exacerbate them. I think it also means that smaller agencies have so far played on the periphery in like a niche way. They can come in because they don't need the scale anymore of these huge holding companies to be able to go to a client and go, hey, we've got a very strong top end idea for you that you can play with strategy-wise. So it opens up the playing field slightly, especially when the technology gets a little cheaper. But industry, like Sue said, is completely contracting already. And it will be interesting to see who comes out as the winners in all of this. Jumping a little bit from our future predictions to the present,

specifically today, Super Bowl Sunday. What are you both going to be watching for? What do you think is going to be an ad that people are going to be talking about? I think Anthropics ad is definitely going to be one that generates a ton of watercule buzz because it's this topical moment in the battle for AI users. And I think even though it's been done very coy without naming OpenAI, I can just imagine that people will see through it. and actually this will get people talking.

I'm going to take the toilet humor approach, literally, because I tried to coin the phrase, the poop bowl, because we have three ads in, one of which is national, a couple of which are on regional buys that all have to do with the bathroom. Liquid IV, I think, has quite a funny ad involving toilet seats. We have Raisin brand in the Super Bowl this year.

I think as a counter-programming to all the techno-politics that's happening at the moment, that will be something that will bring a smile to people's faces. Toilets are actually very frequent on Super Bowl advertising. I guess because people actually don't go to the toilet during Super Bowl because they want to see the commercials. I guess also there's a broad segment of people watching lowest common denominator. Everybody poops, right? Yeah. Everybody poops. Wall Street Truddle reporters, Katie Dayton and Suzanne Bernicea.

Thank you both so much. Thanks for having us. Thank you. And that's it for What's New Sunday for February 8th. Today's show is produced by Pierre Biennameh with supervising producer Melanie Roy and deputy editor Chris Zinsley. I'm Alex Ossala and we'll be back tomorrow morning with a brand new show. Until that, thanks for listening. What does leadership really look at?

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