An AI-generated ad aired during NBA finals and cost just $2,000

AI-generated commercials are ready for primetime.

If you watched the NBA finals on Wednesday, you may have seen an ad that features a shirtless elderly gentleman draped in an American flag, a farmer floating in an inflatable pool filled with eggs, an alien chugging a pitcher of beer, and a lady in a sparkly pink tracksuit driving a Zamboni.

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Once your eyes recovered from the unhinged scenes, you would be right in assuming that this ad was created using generative AI. What's more, the Kalshi AI ad only took $2,000 and two days to create, according to YouTuber and filmmaker PJ Ace, who created the commercial.

The AI creation was an advertisement for Kalshi, a market where users can place real-money trades on real-world events. Obviously, since it aired during the basketball game, the ad's AI-generated characters shared (yelled) whether they wanted the Oklahoma City Thunder or Indiana Pacers to win the championship (Indiana currently leads 2-1 in the series). But it also showed AI characters betting on things like whether the price of eggs would go up, hence the inflatable pool.

After posting the video on X, Kalshi confirmed that it was created using Veo 3, Google's latest AI video generator that also supports audio. Now that Veo 3 has been unleashed, the ability to create inexpensive and eye-catching videos is undeniably seductive to advertisers. Meta is going all in on AI-generated ads for its platforms and reportedly plans to fully automate ad creation by the end of next year, according to the Wall Street Journal.

"We were not specifically looking for an AI video at first, but after getting quotes from production companies that were in the six or seven figure range with timelines that didn't fit our needs, we decided to experiment," a Kalshi spokesperson told Mashable. "We did want some outrageous scenes as that fit the ad's theme of the world going mad; another factor here is that Veo-3 has a clip length limit of 8 seconds, so it was going to need to be structured as a commercial that cut around to different scenes quickly."

In a thread on X, Ace shared how he created the Kalshi AI ad. He said he was asked by Kalshi to "create a spot about people betting on various markets, including the NBA Finals" and decided to pursue this creative vision because "the best Veo 3 content is crazy people doing crazy things while showcasing your brand." And in a YouTube description of the video, Ace said, "Kalshi hired me to make the most unhinged NBA Finals commercial possible." He also predicted that "High-dopamine Veo 3 videos will be the ad trend of 2025."

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Ace wrote a rough script of wild characters and dialogue, with brainstorming help from Gemini and ChatGPT, then started prompting. All in all, Ace said it took him "300–400 generations to get 15 usable clips," resulting in a commercial that he says is 95 percent cheaper than traditional ads.

The AI filmmaker, who has over 15 years of experience as a director, said that while this commercial was made inexpensively, some brands will still "pay a premium for taste." But the future of ads in his opinion, is "small teams making viral, brand-adjacent content weekly, getting 80 to 90 percent of the results for way less."