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Survey Says: AI-Generated People Are Disliked 23X More Than AI-Generated Mascots
A survey of 1,000 US consumers presented at Advertising Week: 46% dislike AI-generated people, 2% dislike AI mascots. Therein lies the case for licensing studio characters to advertisers and creators.
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[Author’s Note: PepsiCo’s first earnings call this morning was scheduled to be the first of the briefs. Claude returned the following synopsis back:
“I read the whole call. The headline finding: PepsiCo’s call says nothing about licensing, characters, entertainment IP or studios. Every brand mentioned is PepsiCo’s own (Doritos, Gatorade, Poppi, Mountain Dew), and the only AI mention came from an analyst [who asked about ‘any AI that you’ve been using for productivity’]. Nobody from PepsiCo addressed AI.”
The only partnership it discussed was its recently announced exclusive global media partnership with Publicis to “build a new ‘One PepsiCo’ media model ‘underpinned by AI and data,’ combining strategy, planning, activation, connected identity, and technology.” (also, I liked this LinkedIn essay by strategic advisor Alex Brownstein on PepsiCo’s partnership decision).
Chairman and CEO Ramon Laguarta shared on the call that management “do not feel good about the beverage business” and so they are “cutting costs in many areas of the business, including corporate unallocated, including overhead costs everywhere, to invest back into the beverage business, also the food business in North America.”
Kraft Heinz solved for a similar growth challenge in its recently-announced partnership with Disney. This suggests that a holding company will be its interface with studios around marketing.
I will send out briefs generated from Hasbro’s Q2 earnings transcript exclusively to PARQOR Platinum members and a select group of highly engaged subscribers. If you would like to learn more or be a part of the test, please respond to this mailing.]
I spent part of Tuesday and today at Advertising Week. The big themes were creators and data in advertising. I found a few that sat on the overlap between AI tools and targeting advertisements.
I struggled to find sessions that discussed AI creative—I have identified around 10 in the schedule including a few this afternoon and two of them demos by the generative AI video platform Higgsfield.
One explanation for this lies in two key buzzwords I heard repeatedly: Consumers value trust and authenticity in their engagement with creators and brands.
That suggests we are still in the early days of AI creative solving for trust and authenticity. A few slides from a presentation by market research firm Cint—which surveyed around 1,000 respondents (63% female) in August 2026 in the US “to take a closer look at the evolving relationship between artificial intelligence and the advertising industry”— offered some early insights as to how consumers are reacting to AI creative from brands.
Past essays related to today’s analysis:
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