Key Takeaways
- The "new KFC commercial" everyone shared in 2025 wasn't made by KFC. It was a spec ad — "Ready 2 Roll" — an AI-generated commercial built by David Blagojevic of film company DaVinci Productions, and it triggered one of advertising's loudest attribution fights.
- Director Joris Noordenbos recognized his own KFC shots in it, recreated by image generators. His side-by-side reel turned a viral win into accusations of plagiarism overnight.
- The other viral AI ads of 2025 — Liquid Death, Porsche, Kalshi — cost between $800 and $2,000. Traditional equivalents run six to seven figures.
- The lesson isn't "AI is cheap." It's that reference-driven generation without original direction gets you backlash, and directed AI craft gets you 20 million impressions.
I run an AI film studio. When the fake KFC ad blew up on my LinkedIn feed, half my industry contacts sent it to me with some version of "is this the end of shoots?" and the other half sent the follow-up drama a week later. Both halves were reacting to the same thing: the gap between what AI generation looks like from the outside and what it actually takes from the inside.
So let's do what we do at our studio after every viral ad drops — break it down shot by shot, tool by tool, and figure out what the brand (or in this case, the not-brand) actually did.
10 Viral AI Ads of 2025–2026 at a Glance
| # | Campaign | Studio / Creator | Primary AI Tool | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | "Ready 2 Roll" fake KFC ad | David Blagojevic (DaVinci Productions) | Kling AI, Veo2, Sora, Luma AI, Pika, Runway | Unofficial spec |
| 2 | Liquid Death spec ad | Too Short For Modeling (Noam Sharon, Tal Rosenthal; CD Amir Ariely) | Google Veo 3 | Unofficial spec |
| 3 | Porsche "The Pisanos" | László Gaál (solo) | Google Veo 2 | Unofficial spec |
| 4 | Kalshi NBA Finals spot | Solo AI creator for Kalshi | Google Veo 3 | Official, aired on TV |
| 5 | Coca-Cola AI Christmas ads | Silverside, Secret Level | Custom genAI pipeline | Official |
| 6 | McDonald's AI holiday spot | McDonald's | genAI (undisclosed) | Official, later pulled |
| 7 | KFC Philippines user-prompted films | KFC Philippines | AI video generation | Official |
| 8 | KFC AI Rap | Addicting Ads (Addicting.ai) | AI video + AI music | Unofficial demo |
| 9 | Porsche "no AI" holiday ad | Parallel Studio | None — hand-drawn/3D | Official |
| 10 | Nike "Never Done Evolving" (Serena) | Nike x AKQA | AI-trained avatars | Official (2021 landmark) |
Why the Fake AI-Generated KFC Ad Broke the Internet
The viral "new KFC commercial" of 2025 was a fake ad. David Blagojevic, co-founder of film company DaVinci Productions, posted an AI-generated spec commercial with photorealistic shots of people eating fried chicken and accurate KFC branding. No official KFC channel commissioned or ran it — and the director whose real KFC work it echoed noticed.
The first act was pure admiration. The new ad looked expensive: glossy product shots, believable steam, crowd scenes, the kind of food photography that normally needs a specialist DP and a stylist who works with tweezers. Comments on LinkedIn called it the future of ad production and proof of AI's creative potential. For about a week, it was the most convincing argument yet that you could use AI to fake a global brand's campaign from a laptop.
Then the second act. Joris Noordenbos, a Dutch director, pointed out that the fake ad contained what he described as replicas of real shots — shots he had filmed years earlier, for real ads, for the real KFC brand. He told Ad Age it felt like "seeing an AI Xerox machine," and his side-by-side Instagram post matched Noordenbos' original frames against their AI-generated doubles. The praise flipped into accusations of plagiarism almost overnight; Blagojevic faced backlash, and the clip David Blagojevic posted days earlier filled with critical comments.
Act three: Blagojevic responded the right way, late. He published a behind-the-scenes video walking through his creative process, explicitly credited Noordenbos and the other directors whose previous ads he'd referenced, and updated the original post with their tags. The firestorm cooled, but the question it raised — where's the line between inspiration and replication when generative AI is trained on someone's real work? — is still the sharpest ongoing debate in creative work right now.
Here's my read as someone who directs AI films for a living: the backlash wasn't about the AI technology. It was about attribution. The craft was genuinely impressive — Blagojevic framed the project as a "test" of how closely we can replicate the visual and stylistic qualities of traditional KFC campaigns using current AI tools, and on pure execution it passed. Matching a brand's existing visual grammar is half of what clients ask us to do. The mistake was treating another director's shot list as free training data and shipping the result without credit.
Shot-by-Shot: How the Fake KFC Ad Was (Almost Certainly) Made
Blagojevic's own behind-the-scenes video makes this the rare viral AI-generated KFC ad where we don't have to guess the pipeline. Here's how it came together, and what each stage tells you about real AI ad production.
It started analog: pen, paper, and a storyboard
Before a single generation, there were hand-drawn storyboard sketches and a rough lyrics sketch for the track. This surprises people every time. It shouldn't. In our studio, 80% of the work is done at the scripting table — that rule from our own award work applies to every viral spec you've seen. AI executes; it doesn't decide the shot order.
The music came before the visuals
The lyric sketch was refined with an LLM and turned into a full track in Suno. That song set the tempo and narrative spine for the storyboard. Structuring an ad around a generated track is smart craft: it gives your edit a rhythm skeleton, which is exactly how we score first and cut to the music on our own films.
How to use AI across a multi-model stack (not one tool)
The generation phase used Kling AI, Google DeepMind Veo2, OpenAI Sora, Luma AI, Pika, and Runway — different models for different shots, because each engine fails differently on food, hands, steam, and crowds. The intro was done in traditional 3D/CGI for full camera control. Then the footage was upscaled with Topaz Labs and music generated with Suno carried the cut from first frame to last.
That's seven-plus tools used on a roughly one-minute fake ad. If you remember one thing from this breakdown, make it this: nobody making viral AI work is typing a sentence into one prompt box. A custom multi-model stack, not a single prompt box — it's literally our studio's tagline because it's the actual job.
The reference problem
The stated goal was to test the boundaries of current AI tools when it comes to photorealism in the food and beverage world. Legitimate experiment — food is where AI-generated images still crack first. The failure mode was feeding the image generators real campaign shots (originally directed by Joris Noordenbos) so directly that the outputs became replicas of real shots. That's how a photorealism test created entirely with AI ends up in a plagiarism firestorm instead of a showreel.
Liquid Death, Porsche & the New Wave of AI-Driven Brand Films
The KFC ad wasn't a one-off. 2025 produced a full genre of AI-driven spec commercials, and the contrast between them is instructive.
Liquid Death: $800 and a Veo 3 mini-movie
The Liquid Death AI commercial that circulated mid-2025 was another unofficial spec — written and directed by Noam Sharon and Tal Rosenthal of Too Short For Modeling with creative director Amir Ariely, made entirely with Google's Veo 3 in about two weeks for a reported $800. It played like a short film: consistent characters, real narrative, brand-accurate absurdist tone. No backlash, notably — because the concept was original. Nobody's shots got Xeroxed.
Porsche: "The Pisanos" — one filmmaker, one spec ad
Early 2025, filmmaker László Gaál released "The Pisanos," an unofficial Porsche spec commercial where nearly everything — exotic locations, hero car shots, even the fake on-set footage — was generated with Google DeepMind's Veo 2. The only real footage was his own talking-head cameo in the behind-the-scenes video. It went viral for its cinematic quality, and it's why "Porsche commercials" started trending in AI circles rather than car circles.
The postscript is delicious: Porsche's actual holiday ad later in 2025, by Parallel Studio, went viral for proudly using no AI at all — hand-drawn and 3D animation — landing right as McDonald's pulled its criticized AI holiday spot and Coca-Cola absorbed a second straight year of AI Christmas ad backlash. Same category, opposite bets, both viral. Audiences don't reject AI or love AI. They react to craft.
Kalshi: the one that actually aired
The Kalshi NBA Finals spot is the proof-of-scale case: a deliberately absurd 30-second ad generated with Veo 3, made in about two days for under $2,000, aired on national TV during the Finals, and tracked toward 20 million impressions (per NPR's reporting). Traditional equivalents of that airtime creative run to seven figures. That single data point did more to change brand-side conversations about ad production than any agency deck in 2025.
Estimated Budgets: AI Spectacle vs Traditional Ad Production
| Campaign | Reported cost | Time | Traditional equivalent |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kalshi NBA Finals ad | Under $2,000 (NPR) | ~2 days | Seven figures for national-spot creative |
| Liquid Death spec | ~$800 | ~2 weeks | $50K–$500K+ for equivalent production value |
| Porsche "The Pisanos" | Not disclosed; solo passion project | Weeks | High-six to seven figures (exotic locations, hero car) |
| Fake KFC "Ready 2 Roll" | Not disclosed | Not disclosed | $100K+ specialist food shoot |
Two honest caveats from someone who prices this work weekly. First, those figures are tool costs plus one person's unpaid time — a commissioned equivalent with revisions, licensing, and brand approvals costs more, though still typically 60–90% below traditional production (real budget bands here). Second, wastage is real: on our own award-winning short film, we generated 1 to 1.5 hours of footage to keep 8 minutes. Only 5–10% of AI generations are usable. One climax effect that lasts 15–20 seconds on screen took 150–200 generated clips. The $2,000 ad is real; the "AI is free" narrative is not.
What the AI-Generated KFC Ad Sparks: The Debate Over AI's Role in Creative Work
The fake KFC ad has sparked something bigger than one credit dispute. Trade press from eMarketer to Creative Review to Muse by Clio covered it not as a tech story but as an ethics story: what does attribution mean when a model can absorb a director's lifetime of shot choices in an afternoon?
The creative community split along a familiar line. One camp sees democratization — a solo artist matching a global brand's production value from a desk, the same wave that's been building since the first open image models landed in 2022. The other camp sees AI's role as parasitic on human work: every "new" AI frame is a remix of somebody's lighting, somebody's lens choice, somebody's food styling. Both camps are partly right, which is why the ongoing debate refuses to die.
My position, for what it's worth, sits in the uncomfortable middle. Generative AI is the most powerful creative tool I've used in a decade of filmmaking — and it has no taste of its own. The human touch isn't a nostalgic add-on; it's the entire difference between the Liquid Death spec (original, adored) and the KFC spec (derivative, dragged). Tools don't get you dragged on LinkedIn. Choices do.
What Worked, What Got Backlash, What Brands Need to Copy
What worked: original concepts (Liquid Death, Kalshi), music-first structure (KFC), multi-model pipelines matched to each shot's weakness, and transparency — Gaál's BTS cameo and Blagojevic's eventual process video both earned goodwill.
What got backlash: replicating identifiable creative work without attribution (the KFC firestorm), and brand-official AI that read as cost-cutting rather than creativity (Coca-Cola's holiday ads two years running, McDonald's pulled spot). The consumer data backs this up: comfort with brands using AI in ads fell from 57% to 46% in a year, and 57% of consumers worry about fake AI ads. The market doesn't reject AI technology. It rejects slop and deception.
What brands need to copy: the spec-ad energy without the spec-ad shortcuts. Commission original AI-driven concepts, insist on a directed pipeline (storyboard, score, shot grammar — not prompt roulette), decide disclosure upfront, and treat reference material the way you'd treat licensed footage. If your AI partner can't tell you where their visual references come from, that's your Noordenbos moment waiting to happen.
One more thing brands need to hear: the tools in that KFC breakdown are already dated. As of mid-2026, our workhorse is Seedance with omni reference for character and style consistency, alongside Kling 3 and current Veo — the 2025 workflows behind most of these viral ads no longer survive contact with today's models (the current state of AI filmmaking moves that fast). Judge studios by direction and process, not by which generator they name-drop.
The Creative Techniques Behind the Virality (You Can Commission)
Everything that made these ads land is a directable, commissionable technique:
- Brand-grammar matching — recreating a brand's visual language (legitimately, from licensed references) so AI output feels like real KFC branding, or real anything, rather than uncanny. This is the skill the fake ad demonstrated and misused.
- Music-first editing — generate or compose the track first, cut generation to its rhythm. We score with Suno plus original composition on our films.
- Model-per-shot routing — food macro to one model, crowd wides to another, character performance to a third, then a unifying grade and 4K upscale.
- CGI-AI hybrids — the KFC intro's 3D-controlled camera is the same logic we use for VFX-grade shots: AI for texture and world, traditional tools for control.
- The absurdity dial — Kalshi proved AI's current weirdness can be a creative feature if the concept owns it.
We've put these techniques through festival juries, not just feeds — seven international AI film awards in 2026, including Gold at the Bali International AI Film Festival. The craft that wins festivals and the craft that goes viral turn out to be the same craft: direction.
