Nearly 90% of advertisers plan to use generative AI to build video ads, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau's 2025 Video Ad Spend & Strategy Full Report.

The headline figure puts a number on a shift that has been visible across agency RFPs and vendor launches for the past 18 months. The report, published by the IAB — the digital ad industry's principal trade body in the United States — frames the finding as a near-universal adoption curve rather than an experimental one.

What does the headline actually say?

The 90% claim covers advertisers' stated intent to deploy generative AI somewhere in the video ad production workflow. The IAB did not break out, in the headline tier of the announcement, which specific tasks respondents plan to delegate to the technology: scripting, storyboarding, asset generation, voice-over, or final edit.

That distinction matters. Buyers and planners reading the headline should treat "build video ads" as a wide umbrella term rather than a clean replacement of human creative roles. The full report, distributed through the IAB, carries the underlying methodology behind a paywall.

Who is the IAB?

The Interactive Advertising Bureau represents the bulk of the U.S. digital advertising supply chain. It produces research the trade press treats as a baseline read on spending and execution. The 2025 Video Ad Spend & Strategy Full Report is the latest edition of a recurring series that tracks how brand and agency dollars move across screens, formats, and channels.

Buyers, sellers, and ad-tech vendors typically use the series to anchor annual planning cycles. The history matters when reading a single headline figure: this series carries enough sample weight that planners and vendors quote its top-line findings in the second half of the calendar year, when budget cycles reopen. A 90% adoption number from this report will surface in countless RFPs, vendor pitches, and conference decks before the end of 2025.

Why operators should care

For agencies and in-house teams, the practical question is throughput and unit cost. Generative tooling lowers the marginal cost of producing variant creative, particularly for performance campaigns that depend on large creative pools tested against narrow audience slices.

The full mechanics of generative video production already form a recognizable stack: text-to-video models generate raw footage from prompts, voice models clone narrators and produce multilingual reads, image generators produce b-roll and product shots, editing models assemble and shorten cuts. Whether the IAB survey captured adoption across this full stack or only across one or two layers will determine whether 90% reads as a transformation or a sticker on the existing workflow.

Three operational consequences follow from the headline:

• Production budgets can shift from agency retainers to software subscriptions and inference costs
• Creative review processes must absorb machine-generated assets at higher volumes
• Disclosure obligations around synthetic media become a production-floor issue, not a legal afterthought

The result is a re-priced creative supply chain. Whoever absorbs the inference cost — agency, in-house team, or platform — owns the margin.

What we don't yet know

The release surfaces the 90% number without the supporting slices. The full report will need to answer at least four operational questions before planners can act on it:

• Whether adoption rates differ between brand and direct-response advertisers
• How spend allocation between human-led and AI-led production lines compares year over year
• Which platforms or model providers respondents plan to use
• What disclosure standards respondents apply to AI-generated creative

Until those cuts land, the 90% figure reads as a directional signal: the industry has decided generative AI belongs in the video ad pipeline. The size of the bet, and where it gets placed, remains inside the paid report.

Bottom line

IAB has put a top-line adoption number on generative AI in video advertising. Operators should expect the full methodology to drive the next round of agency RFPs and vendor selection decisions through the second half of 2025.

The survey's framing of intent, rather than measured deployment, is also worth flagging. Operators have learned to discount stated adoption figures by the gap between purchase and production. A buyer who plans to use a tool is not yet a buyer who has retrained teams, integrated pipelines, and shipped campaigns. Watch for the next IAB release to convert intent into measured deployment.