
84% of marketers now use AI advertising in their campaigns. But here’s the kicker: most of them are doing it wrong.
AI is quickly becoming the most powerful tool in a marketer’s kit. Many dive into AI advertising and expect it to generate winning ads with little to no creative direction. What do they get instead? Underwhelming click-throughs and zero conversions.
If you’ve been disappointed by AI advertising, you’re not alone. In this article, we’re calling out the biggest AI ad fails and how to make AI work for your ads, so you can level up your marketing game.
Treating AI as a Set-It-and-Forget-It Tool
Automation without empathy is just noise. When you choose to bypass human oversight, you generate content that feels impersonal or even alienating to the audience.
The "set-it-and-forget-it" approach happens when marketers set AI tools to create ads and then leave them running on autopilot, assuming they’ll continually optimize without further input.
Can AI make mistakes? Yes, it can. AI isn’t like you or me; it only takes past data and repurposes it, but it doesn’t really create anything new. This is why AI advertising doesn’t react to shifting audience preferences; it needs constant refinement to stay relevant.
So, without any manual adjustment, campaigns turn stale and performance declines. Customers don’t want repetition; they want relevance.
The key here is to strike a balance between AI effectiveness and human judgment. Have a team member review the AI-generated content, ensuring cultural appropriateness, emotional tone, and relevance. This helps your AI advertising not only look good but also makes it feel right.
Need ads that stay relevant? Try AdGPT.com for AI tools with human finesse.
Focusing on quantity, rather than quality:
When using AI advertising, we often try to automate as much as possible; printing out article after article without actually focusing on the quality of said article.
This approach is completely wrong, and here’s why. Rapid ad generation leads to generic content which then leads to a lack of refinement that is essential for high engagement.
One of the biggest AI mistakes marketers make is assuming that mass-producing content will outperform quality storytelling.
Instead of trying to make as much content as possible, try to put more effort into making said article more readable and breathe your own style into it, something your readers have come to expect from you.
This uniqueness and originality is why your audience comes to view your articles, and automating everything with AI will only take away from that uniqueness-factor.
Quality trumps quantity. Avoid ad fatigue with tips from this blog on AI advertising.
You Might Ignore The Bias; AI won’t
AI is never perfect: it’s always trained on a set of data, and that data may sometimes be biased. For example: ask an AI image generator to make an image of a reddit mod, and you’ll know what I'm talking about.
Keeping this in mind, your job as a writer should always be to remove any discriminatory or biased content whenever proofreading AI advertising.
A good rule of thumb is to always ask questions when proofreading; “Is this paragraph discriminating towards a certain community, ethnicity or group?”. If your answer is yes, then maybe that paragraph doesn’t belong there.
Since Artificial Intelligence models are never going to be as ethically aware as you or me, it's always your responsibility to proofread it, since AI doesn’t have morals. You do.
Original or Copied?
No brand wants their ads to echo someone else's message. In today’s world, with AI producing content faster than ever, the temptation of adopting AI tools is irresistible. But where there’s gain, there’s also loss.
AI’s lightning-fast speed can be attributed to the fact it doesn’t always come up with truly original ideas, with nearly 40% of AI-generated content potentially containing plagiarized sentences.
This is exactly why it’s essential to run your AI advertisement through a plagiarism checker before it goes live, further enforcing that verifying originality is essential in AI advertising to safeguard your brand’s credibility.
Forget Personalization, Forget Engagement
While AI is an amazing business tool, it never knows what your specific audience wants to see from you. It can mimic your tone, and learn through patterns, but it can't inherently generate anything specific for your audience if it doesn't have the necessary information.
Therefore, it’s always best to feed AI advertising tools with as much information about your customers as possible; their age, their interests, the way they spend, how much they earn etc.
Think of AI as a library of information, you tell it which types of people you want to target, and it can lock on and personalize your AI advertising accordingly. But it needs to know exactly who those people are before it can do that.
This sort of information will always be helpful for AI to craft Ads that are specific to your audience, and will help attract more potential customers if your Ads appeal to their ethos.
Letting AI Run Wild
There’s a reason prompt engineering exists; not everyone knows how to use AI to its fullest potential.
While I'm not discouraging you from stepping into the world of AI and tinkering about, I'm just suggesting that if you are choosing to spend money on ads, it's not a bad idea to hire a prompt engineer or someone with a history in AI who knows how to harness the full potential of the AI tools available to you.
If that’s not possible, training your existing employees will also make a world of difference in the quality of your ads.
Mixed-Up Voice in AI Ads
Using different AI advertising tools to make sets of ads for your business is going to harm your brand in the long term. Why? Because your brand voice is inconsistent.
Every bot is going to be trained on a different data set, which means every ad produced has a different tone, a different goal, and a different personality shining through. This will confuse your audience and lead to a blurred brand image, which will harm your ability to bring in new customers.
Want to keep a consistent brand voice? Try AdGPT for seamless brand alignment in your AI advertising.
Failing To Integrate AI
If using too many bots can blur your brand image, the opposite can also be true. Sticking to the same format each time, following the same template can make your ads sound robotic, and even stale.
You need to keep your ads varied and fresh each time, but you need to make sure to keep a consistent style and tone, which will keep your brand image intact and your ads exciting and appealing.
Think of new ideas instead of letting AI take the wheel, try new hooks, different formats, testimonials etc, but it should still have your brand written all over it; something’s that unmistakably you.
Using AI in Isolation
I'm sure most marketers are just using chatgpt to generate an ad-copy and be done with it, but that isn't how you use AI to make ads. There’s a lot more to be gained by syncing or integrating AI with existing CRM tools and existing marketing systems.
Using AI advertising to write stand alone ad copies will not yield the productivity you usually expect from AI powered systems. The goal here is to integrate AI advertising into your operations as much as possible, so the AI can actually understand your business and your ads which leads to better productivity and efficiency in the long run.
No More Fails
As AI reshapes marketing, staying ahead means avoiding these critical errors. Now that you know the biggest AI ad mistakes, t’s time to transform your approach.
By ensuring originality, thoughtful integration, and a focus on your audience, you can turn potential flops into phenomenal campaigns.
Ready to create ads that stand out? Contact us now to unlock AI tools for game-changing campaigns.
Question & Answers
Ready to create jaw dropping ads?
Try AdGPT for free. AdGPT harnesses the power of artificial intelligence to bring your advertising visions to life.