Americans dislike AI commercials. A small firm should make one anyway.
A small firm that cannot afford a film crew should still make a video ad with AI. That is our position. We hold it knowing that most of the public does not like these ads, and the numbers below are not kind to our own work.
What people told Gallup
A Bentley University and Gallup survey, published on August 19, 2026, asked 3,270 American adults about AI in advertising. 79% said they had seen an ad in the past 30 days that looked like AI made it. 49% view the use of AI to create ads negatively, and 19% view it positively. The rest are neutral.
The detail is more useful than the headline. 75% accept AI for ideas and early drafts when the business says so. 53% accept AI for the final text, images or video. But 62% say it is not acceptable for a business to use AI to create people or voices in an ad, even when the business clearly discloses it. Among adults under 30, that number is 73%.
The ad we made
That last number describes an ad we built. A law startup wanted a video ad and could not afford a film crew. We made the whole ad with software. A judge sits in a courtroom and talks about the startup for two minutes. There was no camera, no actor and no set, and the judge is not a real person.
So by Gallup’s count, about six in ten Americans would object to what is in that ad before they heard a word of it. We could have left that out of an article on our own site. We think you should hear it from us first.
Why we would make it again
The startup was never choosing between an AI ad and a filmed ad. One production company’s 2026 price guide puts a basic local commercial at $5,000 to $15,000 to produce. That is one vendor’s guide and not a market survey, but it is the right order of size, and the startup did not have it. The real choice was an AI ad or no ad at all. A survey can ask people if they like AI in advertising. It cannot ask them if they would prefer that a small firm stay invisible.
People also judge the quality more than the tool. In a DoubleVerify study released on July 29, 2026, 42% of consumers said that low quality or “uncanny” AI advertising would hurt their opinion of a brand, and 40% said they view polished, professional AI ads positively. 56% said they cannot reliably tell when content is AI-made. DoubleVerify sells ad measurement, so read it as a vendor’s survey. It still matches what we saw on the job. AI video looks real for about eight seconds, and then the face, the room or the light changes in the next clip. That was the problem we had to solve. We described the judge once and the courtroom once, used the same descriptions for all 20 scenes, and a person cut the scenes together by hand.
Age matters too. In the Gallup survey, 66% of adults under 30 view AI ads negatively. Among adults aged 45 to 59, it is 38%. An owner should know who the buyers are before reading the average.
Do not build on one tool
OpenAI shut down its Sora 2 video models and its Videos API on September 24, 2026, and its own page says there is no one-to-one replacement. A business whose ads depended on that one service had to start again.
The law startup ad was made with a different tool, and the same thing could happen to that tool next year. So keep the parts that belong to you: the script, the written description of each character and each place, and the finished video files. With those in hand, you can make the next ad on whatever tool is still running.
If you want a video ad and a film crew is out of reach, book a 30 minute call and we will tell you what we can make.