What was once a sci-fi cliche is now not only a reality, but unavoidable. Artificial intelligence is well and truly everywhere, and that’s particularly true for the world of marketing- for better or for worse.

We’ve discussed AI in marketing in the past, mainly focussing on the ethical debate. But, since then, the prevalence of AI has increased tenfold within the marketing landscape. In today’s blog, we’ll be looking at some examples of this; the good, the bad, and the frankly uncanny.

Civil War: AI movie posters

Cinema goers are eagle eyed these days when it comes to spotting the telltale signs of AI-generated marketing material. But when posters were unveiled for the 2024 movie Civil War (which had a budget of $50 million, by the way), many didn’t exactly need eagle eyes to notice some discrepancies.

To reflect the film’s premise- a group of journalists travelling across a war-torn, dystopian America- a series of posters were released depicting a number of recognisable, and battle-scarred, American locales. Very quickly after the appearance of the posters, and to the presumed chagrin of Civil War’s marketing team, social media users did what is at this point second nature: zoomed in. And, sure enough, many of the smudgy background buildings made very little sense. In other words, they screamed AI.

It wasn’t just the architectural inconsistencies, though. A lot of Americans with even basic familiarity with the locations featured in the posters noted that the geography was also all over the shop. In one example, a poster depicting Chicago had the Marina Towers separated by a river, despite standing right next to each other in real life.

As far as we’re aware, no use of AI was present in the movie itself. But the backlash to these posters has, with any luck, sent a message to film studios: even if AI is only used in the marketing, it can still harm the overall reputation of the product itself.

Did this controversy have any sort of negative impact at the box office? Was it even on the radar of general audiences? Probably not. But why risk a bunch of angry X posts when you could just pay a graphic designer to make a poster that makes sense?

Toys ‘R’ Us: text-to-video brand film

It’s undeniable that text-to-video creations have gotten a lot less nightmarish as of late, to the point where prominent brands are using tools like Sora to ‘make’ entire adverts. Toys ‘R’ Us did this quite recently, partnering with a creative agency for an entirely AI brand film.

Whether you can stomach the ad or not, it is emblematic of how far this tech has come, as well as how far it could go in the future. For now, though, we could do without the uncanny kid close-ups…

Apple’s custom AI emojis

Apple leaned all the way into the AI frenzy at their annual WWDC (Worldwide Developers Conference), announcing a whole slate of AI features that will work in tandem with OpenAI. Most notably, they unveiled custom AI emojis, which will allow users to create their own emojis with a short text prompt.

This came as something of a surprise to the tech industry. Apple had previously been quiet on the AI front. The feature itself seems almost obvious, in retrospect, but time will tell whether it’ll be anything more than a novelty.

Gemini: Google’s AI search results

This one’s less AI in marketing, and more AI’s ongoing impact on an entire marketing channel: SEO.

Google has repeatedly come under fire by SEO experts in recent months for what they deem a gradual regression in the search engine’s integrity. But an entirely separate problem has also caught substantial heat; Google’s own AI search result feature, Gemini.

With Google’s answer to ChatGPT, users can opt to see automatically generated overviews for their search queries. On paper this might sound ideal; in practice, the entire feature has been undermined by numerous reports of frankly baffling AI answers. Google’s VP of search, Liz Reid, has stated that in the future, ‘Google will do the Googling for you’. If these claims end up being true, it could be cause for concern throughout the SEO industry; but they need not worry quite yet.

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