How to review AI creative when you are not a video person

01What should you look for when reviewing AI-generated ad footage?

Three things, in this order. Does the first second pose a question. Is the answer withheld until it has been earned. Does anything on screen do something it physically could not do. The grade, the music and the font are all downstream of those three, and none of them rescues a cut that fails one.

Your job on this call is to be the first stranger, and you are better at that job than the person who built the file, because you have not spent two days inside it. The maker cannot un-see the intention. You can only see what is actually there. That asymmetry is the whole value you bring to the call, and it expires the second somebody explains the ad to you.

02Watch it cold, at phone size, before anyone explains it to you

The most common review mistake has nothing to do with taste. It is watching the cut on a 27-inch monitor, full screen, with sound, after a paragraph telling you what the idea is. That is four advantages your customer will never have. Give them all back before you form an opinion.

The reason the order matters is that a hook can only be spent once. We test our own openings by building two seconds of three different versions, showing them to somebody who has never seen the film, and asking exactly one question. Then that person is used up for that film, permanently.

Ask someone who has not seen the film, and ask once. The second viewing is worthless, because the hook is spent.

From our own hook-testing protocol

COLD WATCH - fill this in before you say anything

1. The question this poses by second 3:
   ...................................................

2. The second at which that question is answered:
   ...................................................

3. Any earlier frame that leaks the answer? (which one)
   ...................................................

4. What the words and the picture claim TOGETHER in shots 1 and 2:
   ...................................................

5. Anything doing something it physically could not do:
   ...................................................

If line 1 is blank, stop here. There is no film yet, and every
other note you write will be a note about the wrong thing.

03A defect note and a taste note are different objects

This is the distinction that saves the relationship. A defect is a fact about the file: the caption is unreadable, the second shot is out of order, the logo is the wrong blue. A taste note is a fact about you: it feels flat, it feels cheap, it is not us. Both are legitimate. They travel to different people, they cost different amounts, and mixing them into one message is why review calls go badly.

The cost column is the one clients under-read. In generated production a bad take cannot be nudged into a good one, which is why we run a hard rule that a shot is re-rolled and never repaired. A defect is a fix. A taste note is a new generation. Saying which one you are giving is the single most useful sentence in a review.

04What do you say instead of "I don't like it"?

Answer one of five questions instead, and hand over the answer rather than the verdict. Each one converts a feeling into a location. None of them requires you to know what a J-cut is, and every one of them produces a note a maker can act on the same afternoon.

05"Make it pop" is a real feeling with a real cause

Makers roll their eyes at it. They should not. It is a genuine perceptual report from somebody who lacks the words, and it usually has one of about five causes, most of which are measurable in under two minutes. The job is not to translate the phrase. It is to go looking for the cause with the person who said it.

Two of those five are pure measurement. Contrast has a published threshold: W3C's minimum-contrast criterion asks for 4.5:1 on normal text and 3:1 on large text, and we hold delivery to the first and the 360-pixel embed to the second. Time on screen has a floor too. The rest of that arithmetic is in the smallest caption that still works on a phone.

06When should you trust a note you cannot justify?

When it arrives on the first cold viewing, before anybody has explained anything, and it is about whether you wanted to keep watching. That reaction is the one thing in the room that is genuinely hard to fake and impossible to reconstruct. Justification can come later, from the maker, whose job it is.

There is evidence you are closer to the audience than the people making the work. IAB surveyed 505 US consumers and 104 ad executives and found the executives overestimating how positive consumers feel about AI-generated ads by 37 percentage points, a gap that had widened from 32. Inside our own pipeline the same shape shows up: builders scoring their own films ran between 36 and 76 points above the owner's score on the same files. Self-scoring measures compliance with the brief. It does not measure taste.

07The notes you are always allowed to give

These seven need no film vocabulary, no timecode and no apology. Every one of them names something a stranger experiences rather than something a craftsperson did, which is exactly the kind of thing you are in the room to catch. If a studio treats any of them as a nuisance, that is information about the studio.

None of that is a substitute for a process. Reviewing well is downstream of briefing well, and if you are inheriting cuts you cannot evaluate, the fault is usually upstream in how the work was briefed and QA'd. The mechanical half of this, the part a machine can run before a human ever looks, is in our pre-launch QA checklist for generated footage, and the argument for pushing taste into code as far as it will go is in turning taste into checks a machine can run.

The best reviewer this studio has ever had cannot name a single thing he likes. He can only name what is wrong, instantly, every time, and he is right often enough that his kill reasons became the data the whole pipeline is tuned against. You do not need vocabulary to be useful here. You need to watch it once, cold, at the size your customer will see it, and write down what happened to you.