What Is Vibe Advertising?

I spent over a decade in advertising. I know the brief process from the inside — the layers of approval, the strategy frameworks, the account team translating client anxiety into creative constraints, the creative director translating those constraints into something the team could actually make. By the time an idea reached production, it had passed through so many hands that tracing it back to a single original impulse was almost impossible.

That's not a criticism. That's how the industry was built. Large-scale brand communication requires infrastructure. It requires people who can hold the complexity of a campaign across months of production, across markets, across legal review. The machinery existed for a reason.

But the machinery was also the reason that a lot of genuinely good ideas never got made. Too expensive. Too risky. Too far from what the client approved last quarter. The gap between what a creative team imagined and what could be produced was massive — and most of what fell into that gap was the work that would have been the most interesting.

That gap is closing. What's emerging on the other side of it is a discipline called Vibe Advertising.

What Coca-Cola did and didn't do

The Coca-Cola AI holiday campaign in 2023 is the most-cited example of AI advertising, and it's instructive in both directions. The spot itself — an AI-generated recreation of the classic "Holidays Are Coming" truck ad — produced a response that was genuinely split. Part of the audience found it sentimental and effective. Part found it uncanny, hollow, a brand eating its own history. The industry conversation that followed was extensive.

What's interesting is what the response revealed about the state of the discipline. The criticism wasn't that the spot was poorly made. It was that it was made for the wrong reasons — not because AI unlocked something that couldn't be done otherwise, but because a big brand wanted to be associated with AI and used its own archive as raw material. The result was technically competent and creatively empty.

The Toys R Us spot — a brand origin story generated entirely with AI — received similar treatment. Professional and uncomfortable. Technically smooth, emotionally unplaced.

These are not failures of the tools. They're failures of the briefing. Someone asked AI to reproduce a feeling that was already known rather than to find a feeling that couldn't exist any other way. That's the misuse of any creative tool, AI or otherwise.

"The brief is still the most important document in advertising. AI just changed who gets to write it."

IMAJIM

Under Armour and the right question

Under Armour's AI-generated campaign work in 2024 and 2025 took a different approach. Rather than using AI to simulate something familiar, their team used generative tools to explore visual territories that would have been prohibitively expensive to produce conventionally — extreme environments, physics-defying movement, light conditions that don't exist. The work wasn't trying to look like "real" advertising. It was trying to look like the inside of an athlete's mind.

That's a fundamentally different brief. The question wasn't "can AI make a good commercial." The question was "what can we show now that we couldn't show before, and does it serve the brand's truth." That's the question Vibe Advertising is built around.

The discipline isn't about cutting production costs. It's about cutting the distance between creative intent and what gets made — and using that compression to attempt work that previously couldn't be attempted at all.

What Vibe Advertising actually requires

This is where people who haven't spent time in advertising usually get it wrong. They assume that if the tools can generate visuals and copy and music, then advertising is becoming easier. In a mechanical sense, yes. In a creative sense, it's becoming harder to do well.

The thing that makes advertising difficult has never been the production. The thing that makes advertising difficult is identifying the true human insight that a brand can legitimately occupy and that an audience will recognize as real. That work — the cultural listening, the ethnographic instinct, the ability to find the particular truth in a universal experience — is not something AI tools produce. They execute from it, if the brief is sharp enough to point them there.

A Vibe Advertiser is someone who has done the thinking to know what they're actually trying to say before they open a generation tool. The brief is their primary creative product. The tools execute the brief. The judgment about whether the output honors the brief is their ongoing work. That's not easier than traditional advertising. It's the same cognitive load in a different form.

The structural shift happening in slow motion

Advertising as an industry is structured around a specific production economics. Big budgets justify big agency fees justify large creative teams justify extended timelines. The whole thing is a ecosystem that evolved when the cost of producing a TV spot was measured in hundreds of thousands of dollars and the cost of getting it wrong was equally enormous.

What happens when that cost structure changes? Not eliminates — changes. Some things still require crews and locations and weeks of production. But the floor of what's possible without all that infrastructure has dropped dramatically. A creative team of two or three people with deep category knowledge and strong AI tool fluency can now produce campaign-quality work in timeframes that would have required a full agency six years ago.

This doesn't make agencies obsolete. It makes a certain layer of their value proposition — the production infrastructure — less exclusive. What remains exclusively valuable is strategic thinking, cultural intelligence, client relationships, and the judgment to know when something works.

The agencies that understand this are already restructuring. The ones that don't will spend the next few years defending a moat that's being drained from underneath.

Where Vibe Advertising gets interesting

The most interesting cases aren't in brand work. They're in what happens when someone with genuine creative vision and deep cultural knowledge — who would never have been able to produce at scale under the old model — can now make work that competes.

A strategist who spent years understanding a particular subculture but could never afford to produce work for brands in that space. An independent creative director who's been too expensive for smaller brands to engage at the level their ideas require. A founder who has something specific and true to say about why their company exists and the taste to say it well.

Cannes Lions has been awarding work from teams outside the traditional agency structure for years now. That trajectory is accelerating. The next five years will produce work on the award circuit that came from places nobody in the industry's infrastructure layer was watching.

I'm not predicting this from a distance. I'm building toward it. The framework behind Vibe Advertising — the idea that creative direction, cultural intelligence, and brief-writing are the core skills, not production access — is central to what I'm developing in The Vibe Creator. The discipline exists. The language for it is just catching up.

The brief belongs to whoever has the best idea

Here's what I came away with from more than a decade of working inside and around the industry: the best advertising has always come from the best ideas. The constraint was never creativity. The constraint was access — to production, to clients, to the infrastructure that turned an idea into something that reached an audience.

That constraint is weakening. Not disappearing — the relationship side, the strategic depth, the long-term brand understanding, all of that still requires time and trust that can't be generated. But the production barrier, the one that kept genuinely good ideas from becoming work? That's going.

What replaces it is a discipline where the brief is the differentiator. Where the quality of the insight determines the quality of the output. Where the person who has the most specific, most true, most carefully observed thing to say about what a brand means to real human beings — that person wins. Not the person with the biggest team, the most expensive tools, or the longest client relationship.

That's what Vibe Advertising is. A discipline where the idea is the only thing that matters, because for the first time in the industry's history, the idea can actually become the work without a hundred people in between.

— IMAJIM