If you can manage it, and it’s okay if you can’t, because this is a thing that only the universe’s strongest soldiers can hope to do: stay on LinkedIn for a bit. It is easier on the creative side of it, so let’s start there. Or, if you can’t do it too overtly, maybe because boomers used to eat you alive for openly loving the launch strategy for Charli xcx’s BRAT album (like fuck! It was good! Sorry you’re boring! Insert an obligatory pearl-clutch about all this snow!), keep lovingly and supportively near it. If that’s where you’re at, you would have seen the revival of nostalgia in Christmas ads in the year of our lord 2026. Different slopes for different folks, that is.
Prada especially got a really beautiful, hand-animated ad that charmed every aspiring art director on your timeline. And the legit ones too. A Disney animator was hired to create a 1940s-style classic animated ad that would speak to the parts of our hearts that remind us of Christmas at home. A strong anti-AI messaging on the forefront, the behind the scenes featured the creative team in every corner of the frame, bringing attention to the animation counterpart that feels as couture as the clothing does.
Then, a Dior ad drops. It’s helmed by Sylvain Chomet, an animator with decades of industry experience, both in advertising and in film. Publication after publication praises the effort… until the actual animators start checking the tweens. Again, different slops…
First, a quick info-dump for normies: hand-drawn animation, which the brand claimed their ad was, is drawn by creating 12 to 24 illustrations to make a second of it, depending on what kind of movement a scene needs. In the process, you will have some key poses – the major movements that draw the eye – and the in-betweens, or tweens for short, that help to picture the movement. Sometimes, they end up being smear frames, or feature really strange shapes, but there are rules that guide how it’s drawn, namely twelve principles of animation that make the motion natural to the eye.
Suddenly, experienced creatives look at details in the Dior ad and voice their opinions. First of all, Dior said it’s hand drawn but the creative team around the ad is suspiciously silent. If you did a high-profile ad for Dior, wouldn’t you want everyone to know you did? But that’s just a small giveaway. Look closer, and you see biblically accurate angels all over the tweens, which is Christmas-themed, I guess… It’s just unfortunate it’s also a meme. Sixteen fingers on one frame, five paws on a dog on another, the narrative doesn’t check out at all, and while an animator would sometimes draw a silly looking frame for fluid motion, it’s unlikely they would forget how many fingers a human had. All of this is insane work from a house that spends millions to fight counterfeit handbags: how does that differ from counterfeit craft they just advertised themselves with?
Since 2022, gen-AI has been sold with the same promise: if you think it’s funny now, wait till it improves. From the perspective of creatives, gen-AI came into the creative industry without a specific problem to solve, and looking for a use case. And don’t get me wrong, crafty ads were always the matter of who could afford the execution: your local small businesses would have had WordArt on posters before, now they have glossy images – and you often can tell that they’re AI-generated. But couture requires the human finish to be trusted, and gradually, more people seem to be expecting it.
The suspected AI, the claim it was hand-drawn, and the backlash that followed say a lot about how people feel about generative AI right now.
Maybe you’re not half as chronically online as I am either (good for you!), but if you spend any time on social media, think about all the TikTok shop ads for the cheap tat you see. An awful lot of it is AI-generated, and the trend with ads is that people generally trust the artificiality of it less. People make fun of it, too. Like you couldn’t even pay an influencer, and you’ve got seven of them on every street corner these days, that level of budget! Which increasingly looks like the future where generative AI is relegated to the role of a cheap, mass-produced thing that you don’t really want to represent the entirety of your brand with. Especially if your whole brand is a history of high-quality work and excellent customer experience that is worth the attached price tag, and couture pieces that are creative, timeless and trend-setting.
The luxury sector seems to be fighting off this problem in particular. It spent years raising prices instead of quality, and not everyone wants to keep paying. Fabrics are not what they used to be, and more often than not you’re paying outrageous money for polyester blends you could get for a fraction of the price at a fast fashion retailer (not that it’s good, but it’s not couture either). Your brand might be ever-present on social media with turbo-charged levels of content, but that doesn’t mean you are getting through to the people that are still willing to pay. That might also mean the fashion house is unintentionally transforming what it stands for. And expensive isn’t luxury anymore if quality isn’t there.
And it’s not just the luxury brands. Others are becoming conscious of what image they project, too. E.l.f. is a high-street cosmetics brand that also produced a beautiful stop-motion ad this year, with the majority of their team being women as another win. Levi’s are doing it. Apple are, too, despite their best efforts to enshittify phones. More market research companies are publishing data that as far as people can tell, they prefer human-made ads.
It goes beyond ads, too: creatives are signalling the handmade part of their work more loudly. Many are leaning into the imperfection and away from the polished sound and polished footage, from musicians and filmmakers at grassroots level, to the likes of Slayyyter who deliberately went with production that sounded a bit more grimy and “rough around the edges” on her 2026 album Worst Girl in America. That calls back to punk, and to indie sleaze, with a deliberate stance against surface-level perfection.
People deliberately write in lowercase and cultivate beef with punctuation on social media to keep a certain tone of voice, and that includes brands, too. Handmade, or human-made, is becoming a badge of honour with a price tag on it that – and this is the hopecore we’re waiting for – may well help creatives get paid. And I feel really smug to have said that years ago.
Saying all that, I do think that while we can be harsh on brands, we shouldn’t be too harsh on creatives. Advertising is still a world that is led by money in corporate. Even creatives like Chomet can produce bad work if the conditions aren’t great, or don’t allow for making decisions that fit the brief. We will never know if suits from a brand intervened, or if time pressure ended up forcing the decision about genAI, but in the year of our lord 2026, we can make quite a few guesses.
While I might be rolling my eyes at genAI as it is, I do think that people like Demis Hassabis – an accomplished scientist who wanted to create artificial intelligence, and not in the bastardised sense of this term, to solve world problems – focus on scientific application of AI other than the chatbots. Dude has a Nobel prize in chemistry at this point. To me, looking at what he’s doing still makes it clear that the technology is useful, just not in your fridge on an open-source model that generates daily cartoons for you.
That fridge might well get hacked, by the way.
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