future state

How Generative AI Is Transforming Advertising Development

How Generative AI Is Transforming Advertising Development

  • ARF
  • CREATIVE COUNCIL

Generative AI is changing how advertising creative is developed—but not by replacing human creativity. Drawing on interviews with industry leaders and a broad review of emerging research, this ARF Creative Council white paper examines how AI is being used across the creative process, from briefing and ideation to personalization and optimization. It explores where AI delivers the greatest value today, the risks organizations continue to navigate and why human judgment remains central to producing distinctive, effective advertising.

Member Only Access
A Year Inside the Psychology of GenAI: What ARF Research Reveals About How AI Thinks

A Year Inside the Psychology of GenAI: What ARF Research Reveals About How AI Thinks

  • Psychology of GenAI
  • ARF; MSI

After conducting eight studies over the past year, what has the ARF learned about the psychology of generative AI? Across experiments examining bias, identity cues, product recommendations, executive decision-making and AI-assisted research, four patterns repeatedly emerged: GenAI tends to compress human variability into dominant responses, subtle differences in prompting can meaningfully change outputs, different models bring their own constraints and tendencies and AI can imitate the language of expertise more readily than it can exercise expert judgment. Taken together, the studies suggest that GenAI’s greatest strength and its greatest risk may be the same: its ability to produce coherent, convincing answers can make compression, instability and missing judgment difficult to see.

Member Only Access
Beyond the Hype: How AI Is Reshaping Modern Marketing

Beyond the Hype: How AI Is Reshaping Modern Marketing

  • ARF ORIGINAL RESEARCH

Artificial intelligence has rapidly become part of the everyday marketing toolkit, transforming everything from creative development and campaign measurement to analytics and customer engagement. Drawing on two nationwide surveys of more than 200 U.S. advertisers and agencies, this new ARF study explores where AI adoption stands today, which tools marketers rely on most, how organizations are validating AI outputs and the governance practices emerging as AI becomes central to marketing operations.

Member Only Access
From AI Adoption to AI Accountability: What Comes Next for Advertisers

From AI Adoption to AI Accountability: What Comes Next for Advertisers

  • ARF; The Advertising Club of New York

Artificial intelligence is becoming deeply embedded in advertising and marketing, but adoption alone is no longer the story. In this guest article for The Advertising Club of New York, ARF Senior Director of Research & Insights Tracy Adams examines findings from the ARF's latest AI research, which reveals that while organizations are increasingly confident in AI-generated outputs, many are still developing the testing, governance and measurement practices needed to ensure those outputs deliver meaningful business value.

 Next »