Ivan Doruda, CEO, MGID

The industrial revolution flooded markets with mass produced goods, making now essential items accessible for the general population for the first time. It also created the luxury market, where those who wanted quality or status sought the handcrafted works of artisans rather than the works of factories. Today, as the AI revolution brings the power of mass production to advertising, we’re seeing signs of a similar split as prestige brands such as Porsche emphasize the handcrafted creatives of their campaigns. Is this the beginning of artisanal advertising?

Why the luxury market’s response to AI affects us all

 An iconic red sports car sweeps through idyllic autumn scenery and slick city streets. Showrooms, car meetups, and bumper stickers pack in Easter Eggs for the dedicated gearheads. This was Porsche’s most recent holiday advert, ‘Porsche Holiday: The Coded Love Letter’, presented in a beautiful, polished, and consistent art style. On a behind-the-scenes post on Instagram, the brand made its intent clear:

“From rough sketches to final frames. Hand-drawn, built, refined – we went deep into every detail. This is how Porsche Holiday came to life with Parallel Studio. This one belongs to the community. On to the next moments.”

While not explicitly stating an anti-AI sentiment, fans read between the lines, and they loved it. It was premium advertising for a premium brand, its reputation for craft and detail woven into the creative of the campaign.

Porsche’s bespoke animated ad is an example of why we must consider the broader cultural and status connotations that may become associated with AI as it becomes more commonplace. For all of AI’s promise to provide day-to-day conveniences, it’s safe to assume the wealthy (who do not have to sacrifice quality in the service of scale) will continue to seek primarily human products and services.

AI may well become another dividing line between the haves and have-nots, at which point its aesthetics will become off-putting to high-net-worth or culturally influential audiences.

Marketers outside the luxury category may not think they need to worry, but such associations tend to trickle down the class ladder, as the status symbols of the elite become cultural markers of success and desire. People who may never even sit in a Porsche will be exposed to the campaign and understand the association it makes between luxury and human creativity, and the inverse implication that AI is not luxurious.

Should this association take hold in the zeitgeist, any luxury brand (or any brand that wants to portray luxury) will steer clear of AI. Along with Porsche, the likes of Burberry, Hermes, and Bottega Veneta have emphasized their artisanal approach not just in their products but also in how they advertise them, showcasing the creators that contributed to their vision.

The question, especially for the agencies making these ads, is what proportion of the market will demand handcrafted creative? On the performance side of things, where the adverts are very simple and where scale and speed matter more than fidelity, generative AI’s benefits are obvious and are unlikely to cause consumers to turn up their noses.

Likewise, audiences are more likely to forgive an SME leaning on AI than a big-name brand, and everyone from Meta to streaming platforms are rolling out generative tools to help this segment of advertisers break into channels that are otherwise cost-prohibitive. It’s more important to an SME that they simply get the message out. For premium brands, the medium can say just as much as the message.

AI avoids advertising backlash when it is additive

It’s not only luxury brands that are explicitly distancing themselves from AI as part of their marketing strategy.

Polaroid hitched its wagon to the digital detox trend in a campaign featuring slogans such as “AI can’t generate sand between your toes”, a natural fit for a company specialising in analogue technology. L’Oréal, despite rolling out AI tools such as virtual make up testing and its Beauty Genius AI assistant, has disallowed the use of AI to generate images of humans, showing that brands can leverage the technology for smart new consumer facing features while being more cautious in other channels.

Dove, meanwhile, leaned into the ethical considerations of AI use and drew a line in the sand in its #KeepBeautyReal campaign, stating, “The rise of AI poses one of the greatest threats to real beauty in the last 20 years, meaning representation is more important than ever. That’s why Dove is renewing its vow to champion real beauty, with a commitment to never use AI to create or distort images of women.”

What Dove recognizes is that much of the uneasiness around AI is due to a matter of trust. If a campaign is presenting people as if they are real when they are generated, audiences would rightfully consider it deceptive. This is doubly true when portraying people from underrepresented backgrounds, as it deprives opportunity from models and actors that already struggle to be included in briefs while exploiting their visible difference for commercial gain.

So, outside of a pure performance context, where is it appropriate to use generative AI in advertising? No one wants to feel that they are being deceived or treated as less worthy, so generated content that is attempting to appear real or like genuine artistic output will always be treading on thin ice.

A safer bet is to use generative AI explicitly for campaigns that would not be possible without it. This way, the technology feels new and additive rather than a way to cut corners or replace human creativity.

One of the best examples of this was also one of the earliest gen AI campaigns. Back in 2021, Ogilvy India joined forces with Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan to use his likeness to promote small businesses, who could generate their own personalized ads through an online portal and distribute them via social media. There’s no risk of deception as any reasonable person would know that Shak Rukh Khan wouldn’t be advertising their local grocery store, so the campaign was a way to have fun with the technology and bring SMEs along for the ride.

Generative AI can be used creatively, perhaps even luxuriously, but not by trying to regurgitate what came before with less pleasing or authentic results. As the advertising world splits between handcrafted, bespoke, artisanal campaigns and mass-produced, generated creatives, agencies will have to think carefully about where they deploy AI and how.

As always, advertisers who stay on the pulse of consumer opinion will be most capable of crafting creative that connects with hearts and minds. Today, advertisers should ask why “slop” was Merriam-Webster’s word of the year for 2025, and how they can avoid their brand being tarnished by AI use that falls short of its image. After all, there’s nothing luxury about slop.