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SeedPublished 2026-10-23

AI-generated advertising and the consumers who notice

Advertising appears on 15 recent papers, online advertising on 9 and AI-generated advertising on 3, in the management and economics journals, while AI-generated content appears on 33. Brands now generate images, copy and whole campaigns with models. Does disclosure of AI use change how consumers respond, and does generated advertising work?

managementmarketingai

What prompted this#

Since October 2025, 99 papers carry an advertising keyword (40 in management journals, 25 in economics), including "advertising" on 15, "online advertising" on 9, "advertising expenditure" on 10 and "AI-generated advertising" on 3. Only 14 of the 99 also carry an AI-generated, generative, synthetic, AI or algorithm keyword, while "AI-generated content" appears on 33 papers, mostly in AI journals about detection.

Questions#

  • In field experiments, do AI-generated advertisements get the same click and conversion rates as agency-made ones, and does the gap depend on product type?
  • When platforms label AI-generated advertisements, as some now do, does the label reduce trust and purchases, and for which brands?
  • Do cheaper creative costs lead firms to run more variants and more total advertising, and does that change competition for attention?

Data that could help#

Advertising platform experiments with creative-level performance, labelling policy dates, and advertising spending data by firm.

Next step#

Run a field experiment on an advertising platform comparing labelled and unlabelled AI-generated creatives with human-made ones for the same products.

The keywords this note follows, in the tracked finance, accounting, economics, management, operations research and AI journals as of 2026-10-26
KeywordPapers, last 30 daysRankPapers per month, Oct 23 – Oct 26*Papers, last 36 months
advertising2#130342
AI-generated content1#288172
online advertising0–44

Markdown version of this note: /ideas/ai-generated-advertising.md

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Cite this page

Scholar4AI. (2026). AI-generated advertising and the consumers who notice. Journal Research Rankings. Retrieved October 23, 2026, from https://scholar4ai.com/ideas/ai-generated-advertising

@misc{scholar4ai-ideas-ai-generated-advertising,
  author = {{Scholar4AI}},
  title = {AI-generated advertising and the consumers who notice},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://scholar4ai.com/ideas/ai-generated-advertising}},
  urldate = {2026-10-23},
  note = {Journal Research Rankings; data from OpenAlex (CC0); licensed CC BY-NC 4.0}
}

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