A fake Nike ad had the realest lesson

If you liked this newsletter, please forward it to someone who might like it too. If you didn’t like it, feel free to send it to someone you don’t like. 🫶

Ok now, let’s get into what happened this week. 🚀

🚨 TRENDING TOPICS

✅ Las Vegas Sphere gets Chines competition

New Sphere-style entertainment venues are set to open in two cities in China, offering large-scale immersive visual experiences similar to the famous Sphere in Las Vegas, but at a lower cost. The venues will use massive LED display technology and wraparound visual environments designed for concerts, digital entertainment, and immersive media experiences.

✅ **Watch east side effects’ VFX breakdown for season 2 of ‘Severance’**A new breakdown from studio East Side Effects reveals some of the hidden VFX work behind Season 2 of Severance, including environment extensions, digital set work, and seamless visual cleanups used throughout the show.

WATCH IT HERE

✅ Sora shutdown causes AI-powered film to miss Cannes debutAI-assisted animated film Critterz was supposed to become a proof point for generative AI filmmaking at Cannes, but reportedly missed its planned festival moment after OpenAI shut down access to Sora, the video tool the production had heavily built around.

The story landed right in the middle of Cannes’ bigger AI debate: AI-generated films were reportedly kept out of the main competition, while AI still dominated panels, market conversations, and private screenings.

✅ AI brings legacy icons back on stage. Ozzy Osbourne is set to return as an AI-powered hologram experience across the UK and US, while Stan Lee’s voice and likeness are being brought back through a new ElevenLabs partnership for approved AI-generated cameos.

Different industries, same signal: entertainment is turning legacy figures into interactive digital IP. It’s no longer just archive footage, tribute shows, or old interviews. Artists, creators, and cultural icons can now keep appearing through holograms, cloned voices, avatars, and synthetic performances.

⚡️ Industry Deep Dive

One of the most praised  and viral Nike ads on social media in the last weeks wasn’t actually made by Nike.

It was a spec concept by Asher Hyde, a 20-year-old design student at USC, built around Victor Wembanyama and the line: “Stop him? Just pray.”

The idea tapped into a real cultural moment: nuns showing up courtside at Spurs games, reports on Wembanyama becoming almost impossible to guard.

Add Nike’s long history of turning athletes into something bigger than sport, and the campaign instantly felt real. And this is where the story gets bigger than one fake Nike ad.

We seeing this wave of lot of younger creatives  discovering old Nike, McDonald’s, and Apple campaigns through reposts on Reddit, X, and Instagram. Those references get shared, studied, remixed, and reinterpreted through AI. A legacy campaign becomes raw material for a new generation of spec work.

That gives brands with a strong creative archive a strange new advantage: people keep building on their past for free, extending it with a new creative point of view.

They get cultural relevance, renewed attention, and free brand-building without approving a single brief. But that only works if the brand has a clear creative world to begin with.

The current AI backlash in advertising is not really about AI. It’s about work that feels empty. When something is generated without a point of view, people can feel it. AI just makes that absence harder to hide, because it can produce polished visuals at high speed.

But polish is not the same as meaning. What Asher Hyde did was simple, but rare: he read culture, connected the dots, and executed before the moment got old.

That is what many brands struggle with. Not because they lack budgets or technology, but because they often move too slowly, too safely, and too far away from culture.

AI can help teams move faster, visualize ideas earlier, and react to cultural moments while they still matter. But it cannot replace the part where someone understands why a moment matters in the first place.

The brands that win won’t be the loudest anti-AI brands or the fastest AI users.

They’ll be the ones with the clearest point of view.

🧠 WEEKLY AI CREATIVE

This is part 10 of our weekly series where we test the AI tools everyone is talking about and figure out what they’re actually useful for.

This week, we took two things already floating around culture, the current Swatch collab craze and Drake’s Iceman era, and turned them into a fictional cinematic watch concept.

The idea: What if Drake got the AP Swatch he deserved for Iceman?

We used GPT Image 2 to design a frozen AP Swatch-inspired colorway, with translucent icy resin, a frosted bezel, a skeleton dial, and the OVO owl locked inside like a diamond in glass. Then we used Seedance 2.0 to bring the concept to life as a cinematic product workflow.

See the full breakdown (prompts included) in this week’s spec ad.

AI ad test: AP SWATCH x Iceman

Want to discover FOOH, DOOH & CGI Ads examples?

Explore our Library