AI ads that hide artificial origins ‘outperform human creative’
Credit: Taboola
A study conducted by four leading universities found that AI-generated advertising outperforms human creative, as long as it doesn’t look too artificial.
The study was conducted by Columbia University, Harvard University, Technical University of Munich, and Carnegie Mellon University, using data from Taboola’s performance marketing platform, Realize.
The researchers mined live ad performance data from over 300,000 advertisements, which garnered over 500m impressions, and around 3m click-throughs. In order to ensure robust data, the researchers compared matched pairs of AI-generated and human-made ads made by the same advertiser, for the same campaign, with the same objectives.
“This approach isolated the impact of creative generation method while controlling for all other performance variables,” the report said.
The study used what researchers call “sibling ads” to see what gets people clicking
The main takeaway is that AI-generated ads can achieve comparable or higher clickthrough rates to human-made creative without sacrificing conversion quality. The caveat: the AI-generated campaigns perform best when featuring (fake) humans.
Overall, human-made commercials achieved a 0.65% click-through rate, while their AI counterparts saw a 0.76% CTR.
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Viewers “frequently struggled to accurately identify” whether an ad was created by AI or a human, and nearly half of AI-made ads were perceived as human creations. Interestingly, the perception of whether or not an ad is AI-generated influenced how effective it was.
Perception is reality: Consumers gravitate more towards ads they assume are human-made
AI-generated ads that are perceived as being human-made (ie ads that have concealed their artificial origin) achieved the highest click-through rates of all, outperforming AI-made ads that are obviously AI, as well as human-made ads.
“These findings indicate that AI-generated creatives can deliver efficiency and speed without compromising effectiveness in live advertising environments,” the report noted.
The research also tackled whether or not AI-generated ads may just be increasing so-called “curiosity” clicks that don’t actually result in meaningful conversions.
“The data showed no evidence of reduced downstream conversion performance,” the report found. “In other words, fears that AI-driven ads will underperform or drive irrelevant traffic are not supported by real world evidence.”
Again, perception plays the biggest role in an ad’s ultimate success. When audiences perceive an ad to be AI-generated — when it is actually created by humans — they are the least likely to click.
“This indicates that perceived artificiality, rather than actual origin, has the greatest impact on engagement.”
But what makes a commercial stands out as being made by AI — even if it actually wasn’t?
According to the study, the key indicators of perceived artificiality include highly stylised or overly polished visuals, heavy colour saturation, and strong symmetry.
On the flipside, the strongest indicators of human manufacture (again, even if inaccurate) is the use of large and clear human faces.
Ironically, generative AI ads made using Taboola’s GenAI Ad Maker tool are more likely to feature human faces than human-made ads. The study notes this is because the tool was trained on advertising best practices “including the use of authentic human imagery to build trust and emotional connection.”
The report concludes with three main takeaways for advertisers (which, it has to be noted, support the sponsor Taboola’s business):
- AI-generated ads can match human-made ad performance at scale.
- AI-generated ads can outperform human ads when they avoid obvious AI cues.
- Perceived artificiality matters more than whether an ad is actually AI-generated.
“By analysing over 500 million impressions, we were able to move past the hype of GenAI and uncover its real impact in large scale settings,” said Oded Netzer, vice dean for research at Columbia Business School.
“Our findings prove that when AI is used to enhance human cues—like the trust found in a human face—it doesn’t just match human performance; it often sets a new ceiling for engagement.”
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