From Alligators to Aliens: First Completely AI-Generated Ad Played During NBA Finals

AI just reached a new milestone — or low, depending on your perspective. During game three of the NBA Finals last Wednesday, Kalshi, a prediction and exchange company that lets users gamble on anything from politics to sports, aired a dopamine-inducing commercial created entirely with AI.

AI chaos hits prime time

The Kalshi commercial barrels from one bizarre visual to another: a man sitting atop an alligator in a kiddie pool, people betting on hurricanes, and an alien chugging beer. The pace is fast, unhinged, and intentionally chaotic.

To explain the fever-dream of AI clips, the commercial ends by saying that Kalshi lets you “trade on anything, anywhere in the US,” including Oklahoma City and Indiana, where both NBA Finals teams play.

However, the most surprising thing about the commercial isn’t what it advertises, but how it was made. PJ Accetturo, a self-identified AI filmmaker, created it in just two days for only $2,000.

Inside the two-day, $2K AI production

Accetturo shared the process of creating the commercial in detail on his website. Starting with a rough script he wrote with the help of Gemini and ChatGPT, Accetturo used Gemini to turn it into a shot list and prompts for Google’s Veo 3 AI video generator.

“I always tell it to return 5 prompts at a time,” he wrote. “Any more than that and the quality starts to slip.” After pasting the prompts into Veo 3, he assembled and edited them himself with a video editing app.

Accetturo explained that it took around “300-400 generations to get 15 usable clips” from Veo 3, which took up most of the two-day commercial production. He described the final product as “GTA-style madness” with “crazy people doing crazy things.”

Bargain costs and the next big ad trend

Kalshi employee Tarek Mansour posted on X that a comparable commercial would typically cost seven figures and take months to produce. In contrast, Kalshi’s ad reached millions of viewers for just $2,000 — a 95% savings compared to traditional production methods.

While this chaotic stumble into AI commercial production may have left many scratching their heads, Accetturo believes that “high-dopamine Veo 3 videos will be the ad trend of 2025.”

As companies race to be first in AI-generated content, Kalshi’s ad may represent the beginning of a new, normal in digital advertising: faster, cheaper, and stranger.

Read eWeek’s coverage about Meta’s plans to fully automate ad creation in what Zuckerberg calls a “redefinition” of the industry.
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