Ready or not, AI-generated ads have come to CTV

Think AI-generated content is prevalent on social media? It could soon start popping up more on bigger screens.

Throughout 2025, a number of AI-powered ad platforms designed to help create CTV ads have hit the market. Some of those newer offerings include Comcast’s Universal Ads, which hit adland in January at CES, and the self-serve ad platform Mntn’s QuickFrame AI,which debuted last month. The offerings add to existing platforms like Waymark, a technology company that has for several years given local and regional advertisers with networks like Fox and Charter the ability to use AI tools to generate TV creative, and they are also geared toward small- and medium-sized businesses.

CTV ad spend continues to grow, and is expected to hit almost $46 billion by 2028, exceeding linear TV ad spend, according to eMarketer, and executives say they hope offering advertisers the ability to create AI-generated ads will help attract advertising dollars beyond the traditional big spenders.

“Connected TV is now the fastest-growing segment in all of advertising, and it’s not slowing down,” Mark Douglas, president and CEO at Mntn, said on the company’s Q3 earnings call last month. “Yet despite that growth, CTV remains undermonetized because most of the spend still comes from a small number of large brands.”

Get in line: Let’s break down one ad offering, Universal Ads. The self-serve platform made a splashy debut at CES with notable launch partners like Roku, Fox, and Warner Bros. Discovery. (Some of the players involved in Universal Ads, like Fox and Paramount, have partnered with Waymark in the past.)

On Universal Ads, brands can both create ads and buy media across its partners, and in September, the platform was bolstered with an AI-powered video generator. Universal Ads seeks to address the hurdles smaller advertisers may face when buying premium video, NBCU EVP of strategy, Gina Reduto, previously told Marketing Brew.

Some analysts view the tool as a way for the media giant to grow its revenue further.

“If the business has been even modestly successful to start, this factor might add to the revenue recognized by NBCU given the company’s conventions around recording gross revenue (including media costs) rather than net revenue,” Brian Wieser, principal at advisory firm Madison and Wall, wrote in a Substack post last month.

Quick on the draw: Another new tool that supports generative-AI ad creation on CTV and elsewhere, QuickFrame AI, builds out a “ready to run” ad from an idea for a brand in an average of 12 minutes, according to a Mntn blog post announcing its beta launch.

“The way to think about QuickFrame AI is, 97% of Mntn’s customers have never advertised on TV before, so they don’t have TV commercials when we meet them,” Douglas said on the earnings call. “We’ve always addressed that problem. We want to do even more. So the way we see it is, QuickFrame AI is an accelerant.”

Hmmm: While the execs behind these AI ad platforms may be bullish on their offerings, some industry experts have some reservations: Wieser expressed some skepticism about the total amount of growth to be seen from the small- and medium-sized business audience many of the tools cater to. While he acknowledged that those platforms could appeal to smaller advertisers and win their business, a lot of that business could end up being “cannibalized activity,” he told Marketing Brew, “meaning money that would have gone to local TV stations is instead going to the Universal Ads or the Plutos or the Hulus.”

That means that “it’s not necessarily new money,” he said, an important factor to consider potential growth.

“There’s been this myth that SMBs are growing at some ridiculous rate and that they’re driving all the growth for the industry,” Wieser said. “It’s categorically not true, but it’s still a dominant perception that’s informing a lot of choices.”