This week: fake doctors selling supplements, a GLP-1 claim that may have been accurate before a new dose entered the market, and new AI disclosure rules that depend on brands knowing how an ad was made.
Three things landed in the last few weeks that change what a brief has to settle before anyone gets cast or booked. Someone has to verify that the person on camera is a real person. Someone has to notice when an approved claim stops being accurate. And someone has to know which tools made the asset, early enough that the answer still exists.
I've been making a version of this argument for years, usually about claims and review. What's different now is that all three of these have a legal or reputational cost attached, and most teams are answering them after launch.
The fake doctors are a casting problem
A New York Times investigation found hundreds of AI-generated videos featuring fake doctors, healers and wellness influencers selling supplements. The people in them look like the sources health and wellness brands hire on purpose: a physician in a clean office, a traditional healer explaining a remedy, someone showing results at home, confident delivery, credential in the lower third. None of them exist.
Those visual cues were always shorthand. They worked because faking them used to be expensive, and AI made them cheap.