An AI-generated ad ran during game three of the NBA Finals this week. It may reflect the shape of things to come for the advertising industry.
The ad for the betting platform Kalshi was reportedly created on a budget of just $2,000. It shows the many things “people” are betting on, like whether Oklahoma City Thunder or Indiana Pacers would win the NBA Finals or the number of hurricanes that may occur this year. Will the price of eggs go up this month in the US?
To make the ad, PJ Accetturo, who calls himself an “AI Filmmaker”, was hired. He largely used Google’s text-to-video generator Veo 3. “This took about 300–400 generations to get 15 usable clips,” Accetturo wrote on X/Twitter. “One person, 2-3 days. That’s a 95% cost reduction vs traditional ads.”
Also known as PJ Ace, he has been garnering millions of views on social media platforms with his AI-generated videos of Biblical figures as modern-day influencers. He worked on the ad for Kalshi on a two-day timeline.
“Kalshi hit me up wanting a spot where people placed odds on wild markets during the NBA Finals,” PJ Ace wrote on LinkedIn. “I told them that the best way to use Veo 3 right now is to have crazy people doing crazy things while they highlight your brand. They love GTA VI. I grew up in Florida. This concept kind of wrote itself.”
For the dialogues, he asked his “team if they’d put together a few dialogue bits they wanted to include, and I came up with 10 different crazy people in crazy situations for them to say those lines in”. He “co-writes” with Gemini, “asking it to pitch me ideas, then I take the best ones and shape them into a basic script”.
Once the script was ready, he asked Gemini to convert every shot into a detailed Veo 3 prompt. He asked the AI model to return five prompts at a time as a maximum, since the quality dips noticeably beyond that.
After generating the prompts, Accetturo says he pastes them into Veo 3 and puts together the ads using a video editing app like CapCut or Adobe Premiere Pro.
Most of us have seen Accetturo work through the way he turned figures from the Bible into “influencers”. He made these videos using a combination of ChatGPT and Veo 3.
After seeing a video of Daniel in a lion’s den, a story taken from the Book of Daniel in the Old Testament, he went about his AI take.
“The Daniel in the Lion’s Den video was good but I knew that I could improve the format,” Accetturo wrote on his blog.
Veo 3 is currently available to Google AI Ultra subscribers in the US via the Gemini app or through the company’s new AI-powered filmmaking tool called Flow. It supports text-to-video, image-to-video, and prompt-driven video generation.
PJ Ace has said AI-generated commercials like the one for Kalshi are the future of advertising. “Right now, the most valuable skill in entertainment and advertising is comedy writing. If you can make people laugh, they’ll watch the full ad, engage with it, and some of them will become customers,” he wrote on X.
He also said — via PetaPixel — that “brands still will need to pay a premium for taste”: “The future is small teams making viral, brand-adjacent content weekly, getting 80 to 90 per cent of the results for way less.”
Tech companies are coming up with tools that are making it easier to come up with ad campaigns. Reuters and Wall Street Journal report that Meta aims to allow brands to fully create and target advertisements with its artificial intelligence tools by the end of next year. Meta’s apps have 3.43 billion unique active users globally and its AI-driven tools help create personalised ad variations, image backgrounds and automated adjustments to video ads, making it lucrative for advertisers.