For the better part of a decade, advertising has been relentlessly optimized for programmatic efficiency. In the chase for measurable, transactional returns on platforms like Meta, the art of brand-centric, campaign-driven storytelling has been sidelined. It's a world where the brand is often secondary to the click. But in a counterintuitive twist, the rise of generative AI, a seemingly robotic force, may be the very thing that brings the human element of storytelling back to the forefront.
One industry leader is hopeful that this technological shift will reverse the trend, re-centering advertising on the memorable, seasonal campaigns that defined a previous era. We spoke with Matt Bahr, Founder and CEO of Fairing, a measurement platform that helps over 2,000 Shopify Plus merchants solve attribution and customer research with direct-from-user survey data.
Drawing on his experience leading e-commerce at the premium audio brand Master & Dynamic and his current work at the heart of DTC measurement, Bahr described a future where the entire advertising landscape is reconfigured. But before that can happen, he said, the industry has to move beyond its initial infatuation with the technology itself. He argued that as AI dramatically lowers the barrier to creating high-quality video creative, it will unlock a new golden age of brand building, especially for the small and medium-sized businesses that have been locked out of television for decades.
The creative barrier: "When I think about opening opportunities for SMBs, CTV has arguably been there for a while, but the creative has always been a massive barrier," said Bahr. "When storytelling is removed, it just turns into this crazy transactional world and the core of a brand starts to be removed," Bahr explained. "So I'm hopeful that this will bring us back into more of the campaign-driven, persona-driven storytelling that was the core of advertising 30 years ago. As a consumer and someone in this space, that's just way more exciting to me."
AI is poised to demolish that barrier, but Bahr cautions that the technology is not yet a plug-and-play solution. He has seen enterprise teams invest heavily in AI-generated creative, only to scrap it at the last minute because it wasn’t ready for primetime.
An 18-month horizon: "I think we're still 12 to 18 months away from the AI models getting to a place where they're creating creative TV ads with voice via a storyboard that is acceptable at scale, that doesn't require a massive amount of back and forth or post-generation editing."
This transitional period has given rise to what Bahr identifies as a "novelty phase." The most successful AI ads today, like those from prediction market Polymarket, succeed not because of their message, but because the medium is the message. He anticipates this trend has a short shelf life, especially as the technology becomes ubiquitous.
The message is the medium: "I don't think we've seen any AI creative where the purpose isn't the virality that comes from it being an AI ad. The message that gets across isn't necessarily about the advertisement; the message is that this is an AI advertisement."
The true, sustainable power of AI in advertising, according to Bahr, isn't about creating outrageous content. It's about enabling quality through rapid iteration. By dramatically reducing the cost and time required to produce variations of an ad, AI will allow marketers to test more ideas and find what is genuinely funny, memorable, and effective.
Quality through quantity: "I think we might see funnier, more memorable ads. It won't necessarily be because it's AI; it'll be because the barrier to creation is dropped, and you can speed up the process to test the final ad better."
The next hurdle is measurement: Once the creative barrier falls, however, a new challenge will move to the top of the pile. With a constant stream of new, high-quality ads, the next battleground for marketers will be proving they actually work. "It's still not one-to-one. It's not as good as Meta and you don't get the same data, which creates friction for a small business to continuously invest in the channel because they need to know it's working."
This leads to a final paradox. While AI opens the door to hyper-personalizing ads in the living room, a net positive for the consumer experience, Bahr questions the ultimate ROI of that complexity. The effort to personalize at a household level may quickly run into a wall of diminishing returns.
The personalization paradox: "The question is, where do diminishing returns start from a personalization perspective? Is the investment for one-to-one, household-level personalization worth it? That is the question mark. It's Occam's razor. If you're adding so many variables into the value chain, it could just get harder to determine if something is working."
As the entire industry flocks to the shiny new world of AI-powered CTV, Bahr offers one last, contrarian prediction. The channel that everyone is leaving for dead may soon become one of the most cost-effective tools for growth. "We see brands measuring FM radio; it's very cost-effective, but it's old school. I think that's what's going to happen with linear TV. A ton of brands will scale on it because everyone's going to ignore it, it's going to get cheaper, and you're going to be able to buy remnant linear TV super cheap."
