The Instagram vs. Reality Problem with Gen AI in TV Ads

Everyone has that friend whose beach vacation looks flawless online, until a trip to the same beach turns up crowds and a few very bold seagulls. Waymark CEO Alex Persky-Stern says AI video has the same Instagram vs. reality problem, and for media sellers it's costing real deals.

The viral AI commercials are the vacation photos. They're gorgeous, and plenty of media sellers have watched one and thought, "I could make that for my clients."
Then they open popular AI video generators and try to turn an idea into an ad someone will pay to run, and things get a lot less glossy.

That letdown is easy to run into now that nearly every buyer is using these tools, with IAB's 2025 survey finding 86% of video ad buyers using generative AI for creative or are planning to.

Plenty of that output still misses, and even the industry's top creative jury noticed. At Cannes Lions 2026, the Industry Craft jury declined to award a Lion in its new AI Craft subcategory, and jury president Rafael Gil told Ad World News that "many entries were built around the novelty of the tool itself."

Local sellers can't close deals on novelty either. Their AI video has to work from the first spec ad a prospect sees to the last edit a client asks for before approval.

Where the sale gets stuck

Waymark's helps sellers avoid awkward output from more mainstream tools with their own — an AI that retrieves advertisers' own branding and photos and incorporates them into complete, ready-to-air spec ads in minutes.

But even a deal that's going well can hit trouble in the final round of edits. "It's one thing to make something that looks good, but it's an entirely different thing to make something that is exactly what your client wants," Persky-Stern explains. If a client asks for one small tweak and the tool can't make it, the deal stalls, and that's how a contract is lost.

Persky-Stern judges AI by whether it fits how sellers work and produces ads clients will pay to run. That makes ad spend the number to watch, and Waymark has helped support more than half a billion dollars of it so far. "That's the metric we pay most attention to, because it's the real measure of reality," he says.

Sellers can use Waymark's tools with zero prompt engineering and still get a relevant ad in front of a prospect fast. These are the tools making the biggest impact for sellers using Waymark.

Speed changes the math of prospecting

Waymark Automations means sellers no longer have to build spec ads one at a time.

As soon as a lead lands in their CRM, Automations builds one from the advertiser's own website, so a seller can put custom creative in front of every qualified prospect and just give it a quick look before sending the link. "It cuts the most painful 90 seconds of waiting for that video to generate," says Jenn Lynch, Director of Sales at Waymark.

An alert when the prospect watches the link goes directly to the sellers' inbox, so they can turn a follow-up into a warm conversation about their own ad. Across 412 wins logged by Waymark's partners between January and July 2026, 79% of the sellers who submitted a win said the finished video helped them close faster or saved them time.

Better creative widens the pool of advertisers

When a seller asks a small business owner for photos, what usually comes back is a few blurry shots off a phone, and for a lot of owners that's where the TV conversation ends. That's a lot of missed business, considering net-new advertisers made up 78% of the 412 wins Waymark's partners logged this year.

Hayden Gilmer, Chief Revenue Officer at Waymark, hears a version of the problem from almost every seller. "Every rep and every seller we've talked to has a list of accounts they've written off because of lacking content. Our goal is to make that list as short as possible," he notes.

Generative tools give sellers more ways to turn limited brand assets into commercial creative. Lynch says one-click AI upscaling takes a low-res photo "to broadcast quality," and the other tools build from there.

Stacked together, an out-of-season backyard shot can be moved into summer and then animated into footage that belongs to one business, which chips away at the long-standing divide between local and national creative. For sellers, that could bring previously overlooked accounts back into play.

Editable files keep approvals moving

"We have a saying here at Waymark, 'there will be notes.' Everybody can love the commercial, and there can still be just one more thing," adds Stephen Parker, Chief Creative Officer at Waymark. A partner's logo or a new local offer can be enough to send an ad that's 90% there back to the start, and the deal loses steam while it gets rebuilt.

Waymark's Project File Export handles that by giving the creative team what Parker calls "a layered, editable Adobe After Effects file" in place of a flat video. An editor can rewrite a line or retime a scene right in the project and get the client their version without starting over.

Sharper CTV targeting means more versions of the same spot, and editable files make those versions quick to turn around. Laura Brandano-Lauta, VP of Market Retail at Comcast Advertising, points to creative as the most common mistake local advertisers make on targeted CTV, like a car dealer running its new-vehicle spot when it really wants service customers in one neighborhood. "

That service ad needs to be different for that particular audience," she explains. With a tool like Project File Export, creative teams can make more complex tweaks to a spot that's already been approved once, without having to start from scratch.

Closing the distance

Tools like the ones in Waymark's platform spare sellers from the harsh realities of creating with the most popular AI tools, which require an extensive knowledge of prompting to get usable, broadcast-ready assets and end up missing the mark when it comes to representing the advertiser they're created for.

Instead of the "vacation photo" that doesn't match reality, sellers can generate ads that close local deals built from a company's actual photos, sitting in the owner's inbox before the first call and updated the same day they asks for an edit.

That's the kind of AI video worth selling with, and it's how a slick demo turns into a signed contract. As Persky-Stern puts it, "Spec creative equals new business."