CEOs Don't Trust AI Creative Yet. Waymark Is Betting That Changes by November.

Marketing leaders have spent most of 2026 hedging on AI creative. They use it to draft, test and resize, then hesitate when it comes time to put it in front of customers. The usual explanation is some version of "we can't trust it yet."

Consumers have given them reason to hesitate. In the 2026 Bentley University-Gallup Business in Society survey, which polled 3,270 U.S. adults in May, 79% said they had seen ads in the past 30 days that looked AI-made. Forty-nine percent viewed businesses' use of AI in advertising negatively, compared with 19% who viewed it positively. Adobe's 2026 AI and Digital Trends consumer report, based on a global survey of 4,000 people, found that about a third would stop engaging with a brand if they learned its content was AI-generated.

Executives, meanwhile, tend to overestimate how well AI ads land. According to IAB's "The AI Ad Gap Widens" report, 82% of ad executives believe Gen Z and Millennial consumers feel positive about AI-generated ads. Among those consumers, 45% actually do. The gap was 32 points in 2024 and has grown to 37.

Quality is where the argument is shifting

Much of the resistance comes down to how the work looks. Early AI video was easy to spot, and brands worried it would make them look cheap next to competitors who paid for production.

That concern is getting harder to support with numbers. A study by researchers at Columbia, Harvard, the Technical University of Munich and Carnegie Mellon, summarized by Luma AI, found AI-generated ads in their sample produced a 0.76% click-through rate, compared with 0.65% for human-made ads. The same IAB study found 64% of advertisers now name cost efficiency as AI's top benefit, up from fifth place in 2024. IAB cautioned in the report that those savings can't come at the cost of quality, which is the standard AI video vendors are now being held to.

What Waymark released

Waymark, a Detroit company whose platform has supported more than $500 million in ad spend, announced the first phase of its premium creative tier on Wednesday. The release leads into Waymark Cinematic, a story-driven AI video product the company will show in a live demo on November 4 at 12 p.m. ET.

Most of the new tools work on material the advertiser already has. AI Upscale brings low-resolution images and older footage up to broadcast quality. Image-to-Image generates new imagery from existing photos, and Image-to-Video animates stills. Project File Export gives agencies and in-house teams a layered file with editable text, timing and scenes, so they can revise a spot in their own software rather than start over.

Waymark says its customers see a 42% lift in conversions and cut production time by 94% compared with traditional methods. The company did not share how those figures were measured, and State of Brand has not independently verified them.

"Small businesses already have access to TV. What they lack is creative that holds its own next to national brands," Waymark CEO Alex Persky-Stern said in the announcement. "Today's features make any business's photos and footage ready for the big screen, which opens the door to advertisers who never thought TV was within reach."

Real material, fewer objections

The Gallup survey shows consumers draw distinctions between uses of AI. Seventy-five percent said it was acceptable for businesses to use AI for brainstorming or early drafts of ads when that use is disclosed. Sixty-two percent said it was unacceptable to use AI to create people or voices in ads, even with disclosure.

Waymark's first-phase tools fall mostly into the more accepted category. A contractor's job-site photos, a restaurant's dining room or a car lot's actual inventory become the raw material, and the software handles resolution, motion and editing.

"Most advertiser assets won't hold up on a TV screen, and that's where too many campaigns stall," Chief Creative Officer Stephen Parker said. "Now a landscaper can send photos from their phone and see a broadcast-quality spot built from their own work."

For a small business, that approach also answers the authenticity question directly. The yard in the ad is a yard the landscaper actually built.

TV access came first. The creative is catching up.

State of Brand has previously reported that consolidation in connected TV improved buying, data and measurement while leaving the quality of the ads largely unaddressed. Local advertisers can reach TV audiences more easily than they could a few years ago, but many still run spots that look out of place beside national campaigns.

Waymark is positioning Cinematic as its answer for that gap at a larger scale. Persky-Stern said the product will bring big-brand storytelling to businesses that have never had access to it.

Story-driven video carries more risk on the trust question than upscaling does. Narrative ads are more likely to call for generated characters, voiceovers and scenes, the uses Gallup respondents were least willing to accept. How Waymark handles those elements will say more about where AI creative is headed than today's release does.

For CMOs still saying they can't trust AI, the research points to a more specific question. Audiences are relatively comfortable with AI that improves real material and much less comfortable with AI that invents people. Executives, by IAB's measure, are misjudging audience sentiment by nearly 40 points. Brands deciding where to use AI creative now have data to guide that choice, and vendors like Waymark are building toward the side consumers have said they will accept.