Advertising has long believed that people need to see themselves in an ad to connect with a brand. The family that looks like theirs, the person who lives like they do, the situation they recognise, the life they’d quite like to have. Recognition creates connection. Then AI came along.
Take Coca-Cola’s 2025 Christmas advertising. Its latest Holidays Are Coming world was created with generative AI, with thousands of AI-generated clips produced and reviewed along the way. And yet the ad doesn’t need people who look like us. We get lights, snow, trucks, animals, music and a world we’ve associated with December since before we could spell it. So why does it still feel familiar?
Perhaps because “seeing yourself” in an ad was never really about seeing someone with your haircut. It was about recognising something that feels like you: a feeling, a memory, a desire, a ritual. Coca-Cola doesn’t need to show me myself. It needs to remind me of my Christmas.
This is where AI gets interesting. It can create an almost infinite supply of people, places and situations, and make an ad look as though it was made just for you. But personalisation isn’t relevance, and realism isn’t authenticity. An ad can have your age, your postcode and your sofa and still have no idea who you are.
The risk isn’t that AI makes advertising less human. It’s that we use AI to make advertising that looks human without understanding humans. So perhaps the question isn’t “can AI create the perfect person for the ad?” It’s “does the person watching recognise something of themselves in the idea?”
Technology can generate the image. It can generate the person. It still needs someone to understand the human, and that may be the one bit we shouldn’t automate. Nobody has yet explained, to a human or a machine, why a red lorry makes grown adults misty-eyed.