Is this the best you can do?

Welcome back to Digital Gravity 💪

Every Friday, we share strategies to help you grow your business with content marketing and reach ‘critical mass’ in the great online game.

This week, Katie shares her personal take on what to expect during New York ad week (starting October 6th).

Enjoy 👇

🔨 Someone fix these ads…🔨 

By Katie Conover

So Advertising Week New York 2025 is starting Monday, Oct 6. 

What even is that?

A whole week to talk about perfecting your ads?

I prefer to learn marketing tips only from my inbox on Friday mornings at 9 am EST *wink* wink 

But, seriously, I keep hearing about this thing. More specifically, I keep hearing Terry Crews talk about this thing. 

And lowkey… he got me kind of excited.

I mean, I won’t be there (I’ll be overseas, hehehe).

But an event created solely for the purpose of experimenting and researching different ways to connect with your audience sounds pretty cool. 

The speakers are pretty juicy, too. I mean, Kevin Bacon will be there. Dhar Mann will be there. The CMO of Coach. 

It’s legit. 

But, dude. Not be a hater, because I am genuinely interested in this, but some of the ads for Advertising Week 2025… yikes. 

The Terry Crews one I showed above is the best one by far.

The rest are of weird quality, and some parts are definitely fully AI-generated (badly), all with the slogan “tomorrow needs you.”

For example, this dog one... it has 32 likes on the Advertising Week Instagram page… which has 129K followers. 

Awkward. 

It’s completely AI-generated to the point that it doesn’t make sense.

One dog is rating food it hasn’t touched yet.. Another dog says “sweaty sock mix” with 3 folded pristine socks sitting in front of him. 

And the last scene of a woman on a motorcycle is unsettling. That’s a completely AI-generated woman. It’s uncanny-looking. It talks weird.

It makes me uncomfortable.

Another post from the same account has 12 likes and uses makeup influencers who stumble through an oddly worded script that tries too hard to fit in Gen Z slang. 

“6-7!” thrown in randomly… what?

Also, it’s worth noting that both of these videos have subpar audio quality, to say the least. 

Why does a New York event week for advertising have such bad ads?

… I’m not even done. I saved the worst for last. 

This one is AI slop to the max. 

Its people are all fake, their eyes wobbling and crossing continuously. Things in the background don’t follow any rules. (I mean, the wood being risen is wobbling… c’mon.)

And the script doesn’t make sense. 

In the future, there’s a zombie apocalypse, but the zombies are all clickbait advertisements: okay.

So far, so good.

But at the end… when everything is sunny and there are way too many people for the AI to get right, here’s the dialogue:

“Advertising Week. That’s where you discover everything we need, not just to survive, but to thrive.” (This is also where the speaker’s mouth becomes one dark blur for a second.) 

“That everything, even zombies, could be doodles. Could anyone be more doodle-visionary than you?”

“Tomorrow needs you!”

It’s sloppy. It doesn’t make sense. 

This commercial could have easily been made with real people and gotten more than 47 likes.

But now, I’m starting to doubt the effectiveness of this upcoming Advertising Week.

I mean, if this event’s IG page can’t do ads well… what does it say about the things people will learn there?

If I’m not seeing quality up front, will I ever see quality?

What I’ve learned from these weird ads is this: Your ads need to reflect your company.

Your event. Your brand. Your presence. Your voice. 

You.

Put heart into what the public will see. 

You need to convince them you’re worth listening to.

Or else you’ll lose them forever.

–Katie