The Judgment Call

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Somewhere, a CMO approved an AI-generated Super Bowl ad.

Not as an experiment. Not as a test. As the main event. $7 million for 30 seconds, and they handed the creative to a machine.

Svedka is running a fully AI-generated spot. Industry analysts expect half of Super Bowl LX to use generative AI in some form. Some for concepting. Some for production. Some, like Svedka, for everything.

The technology works. The question is whether you know when to use it. And that judgment is yours.

The new career risk

When a human-made ad flops, you can point to the agency. The director had a vision. The talent didn't land. The edit got rushed. There's distance between you and the failure.

When an AI-made ad flops, there's no one else in the room.

You picked the prompt. You approved the output. You decided the machine was good enough for your brand's biggest moment. If it works, you're a visionary. If it doesn't, you're the CMO who let a robot embarrass the company on the biggest stage in advertising.

Coca-Cola already learned this. Their AI holiday ad got called "soulless." Critics didn't blame the model. They blamed the marketers who thought a machine could deliver warmth and nostalgia.

The uncomfortable truth: AI didn't fail Coca-Cola. The CMO's judgment did.

When the machine works

AI can do irreverence. It can do absurdity. It can do cultural commentary and weird humor. Vodka brand at the Super Bowl? That's a defensible bet.

AI struggles with memory. Nostalgia. Emotional resonance built over decades. The Clydesdales. "Mean Joe Greene." The moments that make people cry. Those require human judgment about human experience.

The question isn't whether AI can make ads. 86% of advertisers are using or planning to use it for video. That ship sailed.

The question is whether you know when to use it and when to protect the moment from it.

The governance gap

60% of Fortune 100 companies are expected to appoint a Head of AI Governance this year.

Which means 40% won't.

If you don't have a framework for when AI touches your brand's most important creative, you're improvising. Every approval is a judgment call with no guardrails. Every campaign is a career bet.

Zara figured out one model. AI generates product imagery, but models approve every edit and get paid fairly. Speed and scale, with human oversight on quality. That's governance.

Most marketing orgs don't have anything close to this. They're winging it.

The Super Bowl test

Watch the game this weekend. Half the ads will have AI in them somewhere.

Some will be brilliant. Faster, cheaper, more iterations than human teams could produce. The CMOs behind them will look like geniuses.

Some will be hollow. Technically competent but emotionally empty. The CMOs behind them will spend February explaining what went wrong to their boards.

The difference won't be the technology. It'll be the judgment call about when to trust it.

That's the job now. Not just approving creative. Knowing which moments belong to humans and which ones you can hand to the machine.

The CMO who approved Svedka's AI Super Bowl spot is about to find out which kind of bet they made.