Some ads sell a product.
Others capture you.
You were planning to scroll. You were planning to move on. You were planning to offer three distracted seconds to yet another brand in the great digital carnival.
Then something happens.
A look.
A silence.
A scene too intimate to ignore.
A rising tension that does not ask for permission.
An emotional shift that interrupts your escape reflex.
You are no longer watching an ad. You are following a story. You are looking for meaning. You are waiting for the twist. You want to understand why your brain has just suspended its usual zapping motion.
That is the sign of a well-designed advertisement: it does not beg for attention, it earns it.
The new luxury is attention
For years, advertising believed visibility was the main issue.
Being seen.
Being displayed.
Being broadcast.
Being repeated.
Being present everywhere, all the time, on every screen, until creating the quiet fatigue every user now knows.
But visibility is only presence. Attention is a victory.
Kantar distinguishes passive attention, the act of looking, from active attention, which triggers an emotional response. The latter matters more because content that makes viewers feel something is more likely to leave memories and associations that can influence future decisions (Kantar) .
This explains why some ads remain in memory for years while huge-budget campaigns disappear before they have even truly existed in the audience’s mind.
The challenge is no longer only to reach an audience. The challenge is to break through its armor.
And that armor is powerful.
We have learned to avoid. To close. To accelerate. To mute. To ignore pre-rolls. To skip sponsored content. To detect, in a fraction of a second, what is asking for our attention without deserving it.
Contemporary advertising therefore faces a fierce constraint: it must create an emotional reason to stay.
The emotional roller coaster
A strong advertising story rarely works like a sales pitch.
It works like tension.
It opens a loop.
It creates expectation.
It generates worry, a smile, surprise, discomfort, tenderness, identification or controlled unease.
It puts the viewer into a wagon whose trajectory they do not control.
That is the emotional roller coaster.
At first, viewers believe they are in control. They choose to watch. Then the narrative takes over. It accelerates, slows down, suspends, relaunches, misleads, reassures, destabilizes. The brain understands it is being guided, but it accepts the ride because the narrative reward feels close.
Kantar reports that digital ads generating strong emotions are four times more likely to contribute to impact and brand equity than ads creating weaker emotional connections. Kantar also stresses the need to create intrigue early, because a great ending is useless if the audience has already left before the reveal (Kantar) .
This is where many brands fail.
They save their best moment for the end.
They patiently build a demonstration that almost nobody will see.
They imagine a calm, available, patient and generous audience.
That audience no longer truly exists.
The real audience has a nervous thumb.
It grants you a tiny window.
It does not only ask: “What are you selling?”
It silently asks: “Why should I stay?”
AI does not replace the idea; it removes the bars around it
In the example that triggered this reflection, what struck me was not only the image.
It was the intention.
You can feel direction. A point of view. A will to provoke an inner movement. A human hand choosing where to place silence, where to slow down, where to break the rhythm, where to let the viewer breathe, then where to take that breath away.
Artificial intelligence does not replace that point of view.
It changes access to execution.
Before, an ambitious idea had to cross a long series of walls: budget, casting, sets, locations, permits, special effects, postproduction, timelines, insurance, weather, logistics, validation committees, risk-reduction meetings.
At every wall, the idea lost part of its power.
It became more reasonable.
More feasible.
More acceptable.
More average.
Generative video AI changes that balance of power. OpenAI introduced Sora as a model capable of generating up to one minute of high-fidelity video from text instructions, with realistic or imaginative scenes (OpenAI) . Google DeepMind presents Veo as a video generation model designed for filmmakers and storytellers, with native audio, dialogue, sound effects and stronger prompt adherence (Google DeepMind) .
These tools do not automatically create talent.
They create experimental surface.
They make it possible to test faster, iterate more often, visualize what would have remained abstract, confront intention with output and pull an idea out of the fog.
The creative professional no longer spends all their time defending an intuition in a meeting room.
They can show.
And showing changes everything.
The trap of the beautiful image
The arrival of AI in advertising may create a massive misunderstanding.
Many will believe the competitive advantage lies in visual beauty.
Spectacular shots.
Perfect lighting.
Smooth faces.
Impossible worlds.
Cameras flying through galaxies, oceans, futuristic cities, childhood memories and branded dreams.
All of this will impress for a few weeks.
Then saturation will arrive.
The beautiful image will become ordinary.
The spectacular will become background noise.
The impossible will become a commodity.
The difference will therefore not come from the ability to generate an image. It will come from the ability to build a coherent emotional experience.
A good prompt will not save a weak intention.
A powerful tool will not compensate for the absence of narrative tension.
An AI video system will not turn an empty brand into a living myth.
Tomorrow’s advertising will be won by those who can orchestrate three forces: attention, emotion and the impossible.
Attention to interrupt the motion.
Emotion to give a reason to stay.
The impossible to create a mental image the audience did not yet possess.
Humanize or disappear into the feed
Google’s YouTube creative best practices recommend humanizing the story and using emotional levers such as humor or surprise to create connection (Think with Google) .
The important word is “humanize.”
Not merely showing humans.
Humanizing means creating a situation in which viewers recognize something about themselves.
A fear.
A desire.
A loss.
An expectation.
An awkwardness.
A hidden shame.
A longing for repair.
A nostalgia.
An injustice.
A surprise.
A tenderness.
This is often where advertising becomes interesting. It leaves the product and enters human experience.
The product comes back later, but it returns inside a world that has already created meaning.
When a brand talks about itself too early, it asks the audience to care about its own reflection.
When it tells a story well, it gives the audience a reason to recognize itself before remembering the brand.
That is the difference between a demonstration and a story.
Long can win, if it deserves its length
People often say audiences no longer have attention.
That is a dangerous approximation.
People no longer have patience for what does not concern them.
Think with Google documented the case of a 60-second Carlsberg hero ad: it achieved a 93% completion rate, higher than the rate observed for 6-second bumper ads, with an average watch time of 56.9 seconds and measured impact on ad recall (Think with Google) .
The message matters.
Length is not the enemy.
Boredom is.
A long ad can work if it makes people want to move forward. A short ad can fail if it provokes nothing. Format does not replace intensity.
In an age of short content, a strong story can become an act of resistance. It slows the viewer down. It makes them accept a duration they would have refused to a lazy brand.
Emotion is not decoration
In many companies, emotion is still treated as a final layer.
A team produces an offer.
It builds a message.
Then it adds emotional music, a child, a tear, warm lighting, a slow-motion smile.
That is not enough.
Effective emotion is not decoration added to a message. It is the structure that makes the message memorable.
Nielsen reminds us that emotions play a central role in advertising and in both conscious and nonconscious decisions. A study cited by Nielsen found that ads scoring above average in a neuroscience-based copy test generated a 23% sales lift for the brands involved in the fast-moving consumer goods sector (Nielsen) .
Measurement methods can be discussed.
Contexts can be debated.
But the signal is clear: emotion is not an artistic extra. It contributes to effectiveness.
An ad can inform.
A story can shift perception.
An emotion can anchor memory.
The Toys“R”Us case: nostalgia as AI fuel
One of the most discussed examples of generative AI in advertising remains the 2024 Toys“R”Us brand film created with Native Foreign and OpenAI Sora. WHP Global says the film tells the story of founder Charles Lazarus and Geoffrey the Giraffe, and that Sora helped condense hundreds of iterations into a couple dozen shots, with corrective VFX and an original music score (WHP Global) .
This case is interesting because it concentrates the debate.
Some see a new creative frontier.
Others see a threat to image-making professions.
But the strategic point lies elsewhere: the technology served a brand story built around nostalgia, origin, childhood and dream.
In other words, AI was not used only to show that AI could produce images.
It was placed at the service of a narrative.
This is where the line appears.
AI as a gadget creates a technical demonstration.
AI as a narrative tool can create an experience.
Innovation often dies when it is told badly
In innovation, communication is not decorative packaging. It can become the decisive moment when an idea finds oxygen or suffocates in indifference.
I address this point directly in my book, chapter 10, dedicated to communication, presentations and decision-making.
An idea can be technically brilliant and fail humanly.
Because it is poorly presented.
Because it arrives too abstract.
Because it does not tell the problem.
Because it lists features instead of creating tension.
Because it forgets that decision-makers are not spreadsheets wearing jackets.
They have biases, fears, interests, emotions, attention limits, memories of past failures, political pressures and budget constraints.
Presenting an innovation is already a form of advertising.
Not in the superficial sense.
In the deeper sense: making transformation desirable.
The augmented creative is not a faster executor
AI advertising will not only accelerate production.
It will move value.
Yesterday, part of the value came from the ability to produce an expensive, complex, rare image.
Tomorrow, some of that rarity will fade.
Value will move upward, toward intention.
Taste.
Judgment.
Rhythm.
The ability to feel whether a scene works or sounds false.
The ability to stop an attractive but empty idea.
The ability to create emotion without crude manipulation.
The ability to connect a brand to a real human tension.
The augmented creative will not simply be the person who knows how to use a tool.
It will be the person who knows how to direct a machine without handing it the steering wheel.
They will write, frame, cut, choose, refuse, restart, simplify, intensify.
They will also answer a question AI does not resolve for them: why does this story deserve to exist?
The next battle: sincere intensity
AI will produce a lot of decent content.
Clean content.
Fast content.
Good-enough content.
Content that looks like advertising.
And that is exactly the danger.
The world does not need more decent content.
It is already overflowing with decent content.
Scarcity will move toward sincere intensity.
A precise tension.
A held emotion.
A reveal that illuminates the beginning.
An image that remains.
A story people want to talk about.
A successful ad will no longer only be the one that was seen. It will be the one that created a conversation after being seen.
In a world where AI can generate the impossible, the human role becomes more demanding.
Choose the useful impossible.
Remove the gratuitous impossible.
Orchestrate emotion without corrupting it.
Tell a story that does not merely impress, but transforms attention into memory.
And perhaps, in the best cases, memory into desire.
👉 Which recent ad made you stay until the end even though you were about to scroll?
To go deeper on this topic, the corresponding article is available on my blog, link in the first comment.
Of course, I discuss this in my keynotes, workshops and advisory work, because a brilliant idea told badly remains a beautiful posthumous work.
References
- (Kantar) = https://www.kantar.com/north-america/Inspiration/Advertising-Media/Decoding-Attention-Five-lessons-to-transform-your-creative
- (Kantar) = https://www.kantar.com/inspiration/advertising-media/harness-the-power-of-emotion-in-digital-advertising
- (Think with Google) = https://business.google.com/en-all/think/future-of-marketing/youtube-video-ad-creative/
- (Think with Google) = https://business.google.com/en-all/think/measurement/carlsberg-lumen-consumer-attention-model/
- (Nielsen) = https://www.nielsen.com/insights/2016/were-ruled-by-our-emotions-and-so-are-the-ads-we-watch/
- (OpenAI) = https://openai.com/index/video-generation-models-as-world-simulators/
- (Google DeepMind) = https://deepmind.google/models/veo/
- (WHP Global) = https://www.whp-global.com/blogs/brand-news/toysrus-studios-and-native-foreign-use-openais-sora-to-narrate-the-origin-story-of-beloved-toyrus-brand
