This morning I asked Claude, Anthropic’s AI model, to make me “a cute advertisement for a widget.” That was the whole brief. I can’t code, so I told it I wanted something that would run without me touching anything.
A few minutes later I had a 17-second animated spot. It was for a product that doesn’t exist: Tock, a kitchen timer shaped like a tomato, with a face. Tock drops onto a kitchen counter and squashes when it lands. It blinks, then hops aside for its own title card: “Meet Tock.” It twists its leaf-shaped dial to 25:00, and the countdown races to zero. It lights up and rattles when time runs out, jumps onto a refrigerator (“Sticks to the fridge”), and ends on a “$24” price stamp and a row of colors to choose from.
It didn’t have sound, and it wasn’t a Super Bowl ad. It was about as good as the animated social ads a small business pays a freelancer a couple thousand dollars for. Nobody touched After Effects. There’s no video file at all. Claude wrote code that draws every frame live in the browser, and it also came up with the product, the concept, the four-beat structure and the tagline.
I used to be the tech manager at the Virginia Press Association, and I spent a lot of time with the people who sold and built ads for newspapers. I know how they think. Watching Tock, I knew exactly what they’d think: we don’t need the creatives anymore.
The flood is coming, and it will look the same
My thesis is simple. The next severe recession will push a lot of business owners, and the ad reps who serve them, into making their own animated ads with AI. What we’ll get is a flood of competent, cheerful motion graphics that all look alike.
The tools are already here. In January, Remotion, a framework that turns code into video, released an official “skill” that teaches AI coding agents to make motion graphics. Within eight weeks it had about 150,000 installs, and by August it had passed 440,000 across platforms. People post that they can recreate “almost any motion graphic I find on Pinterest or YouTube in a couple of prompts.”
The platforms are building it in too. In June 2025, the Wall Street Journal reported that Meta aims to let brands create and target ads entirely with AI by the end of 2026, with the business supplying little more than a product image and a budget. In March 2026, Google put its Veo video model inside Google Ads, where it turns up to three still photos into short video ads.
Recessions are when that capability becomes the new normal. Economists Nir Jaimovich and Henry Siu found that 92 percent of the loss of routine middle-skill jobs happens within 12 months of a recession, and that after the downturns ending in 1991, 2001 and 2009, those jobs never came back. The recoveries were jobless. Companies didn’t automate because times were bad. Bad times gave them cover to restructure, and when spending returned, the headcount didn’t.
The bleeding has already started. WPP, the world’s biggest ad holding company, has cut roughly 11,000 jobs since early 2025 and announced up to 1,000 more this month, as clients use generative AI to produce content and run campaigns themselves. Trade press counts at least 18,000 jobs lost across WPP, Omnicom and Dentsu in 18 months. A study commissioned by the Animation Guild and other artists’ groups estimated that 21 percent of film, TV and animation jobs, about 118,500 people, would be significantly disrupted by generative AI in 2024 through 2026. That was all before any recession.
The house style is the part I find unsettling. Tock looks like what Claude makes: rounded shapes, springy easing, sans-serif type popping in one letter at a time. Multiply that by every hardware store, dentist and car dealership that decides it can skip the freelancer, and the commercial world starts to look like it came out of one designer’s hand, because in a sense it did.
Now the case against me
To its credit, Claude argued with me. Its counterarguments are strong, and some of them change the thesis.
The wily business owner is only a brief stage. I pictured scrappy owners outsmarting their agencies. But if Meta and Google build ad creation into their own platforms, owners don’t need to be clever. They need a credit card and a “generate” button. The disruption doesn’t come from thousands of do-it-yourselfers. It comes from a few platforms turning the agency’s job into a product feature. That’s even worse for the ad rep I used to know, whose value was translating between the client and the creatives. The exec who’s thrilled to cut the expensive creatives is cutting the last reason anyone needed the exec.
Sameness might not last, because testing picks the winners. Owners don’t care what an ad looks like. They care whether the phone rings. If the first cheap ad doesn’t work, the owner doesn’t go back to an agency. They let the platform generate twenty versions and keep whichever one sells. Ads tuned that way won’t necessarily settle into Claude’s tidy style. They’ll settle into whatever converts, which may be uglier and more annoying than anything a human would pitch.
Audiences may tune it out. A 2024 NielsenIQ study using eye tracking and response-time measures found consumers rated AI-generated video ads more “annoying,” “boring” and “confusing,” and remembered them less, even when they were well made. This year, the Interactive Advertising Bureau found that 82 percent of ad executives believe young consumers feel positive about AI ads, while only 45 percent actually do. That’s a 37-point gap, wider than in 2024. If every ad looks like Tock, audiences will learn to scroll past Tock.
The counter-counterpoint is Coca-Cola. Its AI-generated holiday ads drew public backlash two years running, and a Coke executive said the 2025 spot “scored off the charts” in testing, among the company’s top-tested ads ever. “The masses,” he said, “do not necessarily look behind the technology.” Critics hate it. The metrics may not care.
Canva didn’t kill designers. Graphic design has been nearly free for a decade, and plenty of small businesses still pay someone. That’s not because they can’t do it. It’s because they don’t want to spend Saturday doing it. Some of what an agency sells is taste, and a lot of it is not having to think about ads. The local human who survives may be less an artist than someone who runs the machine for you.
The creative budget was never the big number. For anything above the local level, the media buy dwarfs production. Saving $15,000 on production doesn’t matter much next to a $400,000 ad buy. That’s why the savings argument hits hardest at the bottom of the market, where production is a big share of the spend, and barely registers at the top.
Not every kind of animation is exposed the same way. Code-drawn animation is flat and designed. It’s great for explainers, logo reveals and product spots, and poor at mood and texture. Music videos will go to the video generators, not to code. And sound, the missing piece in Tock, turned out to be the easy part. Music and voice generators exist, and the same code can synthesize a “ding.”
Where I’ve landed
I still think the flood is coming. Businesses that never had a video ad will get one, and a lot of them will look alike. My thesis was too simple in one way. The winners aren’t the wily owners and savvy ad execs I imagined. They’re the platforms, which will capture the savings, the data and the margin.
The people who lose are in the middle: the working motion designer, the regional commercial director, the junior copywriter who used to pitch three concepts before anyone animated anything, and the ad rep who connected a local business to all of them. The top of the industry survives, and it may get more expensive, because distinctiveness becomes scarce.
A recession won’t cause any of this. It will make it permanent.
And Tock, my tomato-shaped kitchen timer, will be selling something by Christmas.
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