With almost all the companies using AI for their marketing, it is weird that AI companies are not using AI in their ads

It turns out that the world’s biggest marketing machine is running on a human workforce, not on the very AI tools they’re supposed to be selling. Picture this: every brand from the big‑box grocers to the quirky indie startups is now putting an AI‑generated video on their website, hoping to impress their customers with “futuristic” content. But when it comes to the companies that actually build the AI, they’re still stuck in the old‑school, “let’s hire a creative agency and shoot a commercial” era.

Why? Because the AI that spits out images and videos has one huge flaw: it can’t read a brand guide. A brand guide is that tiny, dusty booklet that tells you exactly which shade of green the logo must be, what the exact placement of the wordmark is, and how many pixels to leave around the logo to make it look good. The AI? It just drops whatever it thinks looks cool onto the screen—sometimes with a misspelled logo or a color that’s more “neon pink” than “Coca‑Cola red.” The result is a marketing masterpiece that looks like a toddler got hold of a Photoshop subscription.

Because of this, most companies that want to use AI in their ads will first let the AI do its thing (generating a generic “wow‑factor” video) and then layer the real, perfectly‑formatted logos on top. That’s how the AI Coca‑Cola commercial last year was made: a slick AI‑generated backdrop, and a team of editors who went on a mission to make the Coke bottle look just right. It’s a bit like using a cheap printer for your wedding photos, then hiring a professional to retouch them.

Even when AI is used for images, the results are usually not ready for the high‑stakes world of marketing. A lot of designers now rely on AI for quick “touch‑ups” or to stretch a small image to fill a billboard, but they’ll still go back to their favorite editing tools to finish the job. The “lazy” approach—just dropping an unedited AI image into a campaign—ends up looking like a billboard for a start‑up that couldn’t afford a professional graphic designer. And that’s the kind of thing that makes people go “uhh… that’s… not great.”

Meanwhile, the AI companies that are supposed to be the trendsetters are stuck marketing themselves the old‑fashioned way. They’re still shooting traditional commercials, hiring copywriters, and investing in the kind of polished storytelling that doesn’t involve a glitchy algorithm. The irony isn’t lost on anyone: the very tools that are supposed to make everything easier are still causing a marketing bottleneck.

In short: the big money companies can afford a real ad and still choose AI for the novelty factor, but the AI companies themselves can’t afford the luxury of an AI‑generated ad because, well… the AI can’t get the branding right. Maybe one day the AI will learn to read brand guides, but until then, we’ll keep watching the irony unfold.

I think it’s because AI companies have enough money for real ads, whereas other companies use AI ads because they can’t afford a real one.
Except, Coca Cola.
Coke is the exception because they already have some of the cleanest marketing in the world. For them, using AI gets more buzz than making a commercial at their usual quality.
The multi‑billion dollar company can’t afford an advertisement? Sure.
Because AI video is bad for visual marketing.

When a company gets given a marketing job, they're given brand guidelines (often a small booklet) that tell the marketing company how the logos have to look, what colors to use, etc. The AI doesn't understand any of this, and just drops (often incorrect and misspelled) logos on whatever. There's very little control over what the AI is going to do.
So instead, often times when they use AI video, they fake it. They do a generic AI video and then use normal CG and video editing to edit in the logos on top of the AI video. You can see this in the AI Coca‑Cola commercial they did last year.
Or, in the case of AI companies, a lot of the time the marketing for the AI is entirely faked and just done with traditional techniques.

This also goes for AI images as well. They're generally bad for marketing purposes and almost always have to be extensively edited outside of the AI generator to make them work. You probably have seen marketing that uses AI, but the stuff where they got lazy and just dropped an unedited AI image is going to stand out more. Instead of doing that, a lot of graphic designers have been using AI tools for things like image touch‑up and widening small images to fill out the needed space.

TL;DR: AI companies can’t afford their own AI ads because AI can’t read brand guidelines. Big brands use AI for novelty, but they still need human editors to fix the logos. Coca‑Cola is the only one pulling it off—by using AI and traditional editing.