The new frontier for ads is racist cartoon AI musical microdrama

“I had sex with the wife of a Jewish billionaire heir, and I made her tell me the family secret of longevity,” a cartoon landscaper sings at the start of a recent online commercial for herbal supplements.

That dense tangle of salaciousness, antisemitism, conspiracism and health anxiety is only the beginning. Over the next seven minutes, in the uncannily flat look of AI trained to imitate contemporary animation, the landscaper learns that the elderly Jewish residents of the estate where he works regularly consume cloves of aged garlic. After putting his aging father on the garlic regimen, he gets fired for impropriety with his employer’s wife.

Not until more than six minutes in does the video even get around to naming what remedy it’s selling, ready-made garlic capsules.

Inexplicable though the spot may seem, there are a lot more where it came from. Across thousands of different ads on YouTube and hundreds more on Facebook, cartoon narrators sing about uncovering the Jewish secret to long life or weight loss, or about how a Black woman in her 50s whose husband cheated on her after she gained weight transformed her physique, or about how the “loud” Italian and Greek cruise ship guests “ate more than anyone else on the ship” while staying trim, all set to synthetic, musically inoffensive pop music — and all guiding the viewer to treat one problem or another with oregano oil or garlic.

The real fortifying ingredient in the ad blitz, though, is AI. Thanks to the ability to generate musical animated video with near-zero effort, the supplements company responsible for the clips, Resilia, has launched 8,000-plus ads on Google in the last year and a half, 7,000 of which appear on YouTube, often between Shorts. There are currently about 480 of the ads on Meta.

On Amazon, Resilia is the number-one seller of oregano supplements, and the site claims more than 40,000 units of one such product have been sold in the last month. In a June complaint filed on behalf of the company over a domain name dispute, attorneys for the company said Resilia was averaging $4.5 million in revenue each month and had spent $2.8 million on marketing since its launch in late 2024.

Different versions of the same ads may tweak the race or ethnicity of the protagonist or their particular health struggle — weight gain here, loss of energy there — but the general outline is relentlessly predictable: Open with something shocking, like sexual impropriety or an offensive ethnic trope, then lead into a mystery about how other people stay thin, live long or have more sex. Eventually, after a lot of plot and singing, mention the supposed miracle product and the company that makes it.

The spots are only tangentially related to the herbal supplements they purport to promote, but they’re probably working to draw viewers’ attention to the company, said Jacob Teeny, an associate professor of marketing at Northwestern University who studies consumer psychology and the effects of AI.

The “Jewish billionaire” ads are prime “physiological arousal bait,” generating outrage, disgust and disbelief in their opening seconds, Teeny said. Baffling opening lines, “based on stereotypes and racism,” he said, suck viewers in and keep them (hate-)watching.

If the ad offends them enough, they might post about it. “We tend to want to manage our physiological arousal by sharing it with others,” he said.

Copycats are already attempting to recreate Resilia’s AI ad formula (minus the music). A wellness supplement company called Lymphoria shared an AI-generated ad earlier this month about a middle-aged woman with a genital odor that earned her an HR reprimand and which was supposedly curable with lymphatic drainage herbal drops. Another Lymphoria ad opens with a rude young Black man calling an overweight older man “n***a” and heaping abuse on him. (Lymphoria hasn’t responded to requests for comment. The person listed as the owner of the company in patent documents is based in China, and his US patent attorneys haven’t responded.)

There are at least two versions of the “Jewish billionaire” ad, one starring a Black woman who works as a live-in nanny for the wealthy family and is desperate to lose weight, the other with a white male landscaper worried about his father’s failing health. Whether the story revolves around weight loss and debloating or healthy aging, the constants are the wealthy family’s Jewishness — one script repeatedly describes one person or another wearing a kippah, and they’re shown feasting on challah at a menorah-lit table — their secret supplement stashes, and a backing track that wouldn’t sound out of place on 2015 pop radio.

Last month, a user on X reshared both versions, which were viewed millions of times. (The user later deleted the posts.) Google and Meta have declined to share how many people have watched the ads on their platforms, but the X post’s virality suggests that the ads have been widely seen.

After being shown the ads, including the Jewish billionaire spots, representatives of both Google and Meta said the videos had been removed.

“We don’t allow ads that use sensational or shocking tactics to manipulate viewers, and our policies apply equally to all ads regardless of how they’re created,” a Google spokesperson said. “We removed the ads flagged to us for policy violations.”

Google said the videos violated policies including bans on clickbait and on ads that “make deceptive health claims or entice users with unrealistic wellness and longevity promises.”

But one of the ads Google said it pulled, about the Italian and Greek cruise ship guests, appeared again on YouTube, which Google owns , the next day. (A Google spokesperson said the company was investigating the ad that reappeared. In 2025, the spokesperson said, fewer than 1% of policy-violating ads made it live.)

Meta removed a number of Resilia ads after being alerted to them — in mid-September, there were around 1,500 active Resilia ads on the platform. Now there are fewer than 500. Meta didn’t clarify whether ads had been removed for policy violations or the specific policies the ads may have flouted.

Meta and Google don’t publicly discuss how many times the ads were viewed, but thousands of variations of these odd self-contained stories have been shared.

“The makers of this ad only care about view (and purchase) count, though, so it’s designed to tap into that,” Teeny said.

Generative AI makes it exceedingly easy and cheap to produce and test variants of these ads, Teeny said. Advertisers can produce a lengthy, animated musical video in less time than it takes to watch it, and people aren’t required at any step of the process beyond plunking in the proper prompt for Claude or another platform.

“Now, instead of one expensive ad you have to get right, you make 20 strange ones and let the algorithm tell you which works,” Teeny said. That could explain why the “Jewish billionaire” ads feel like soap operas cobbled together from disparate storylines.

And with that technology at its disposal, the tiny and once-obscure Resilia has become a ubiquitous advertiser on Google in a little over a year.

Resilia registered as an LLC in January. Its CEO, Johnathan Sack, is also registered as the person who incorporated a company called Sack Consulting Inc., which is listed on Google as the company behind Resilia’s ads. The June complaint describes Resilia as a “top brand” of Sack Consulting Inc.

The company’s Facebook page, apparently based in France, was inactive until late 2025 and before that, mostly shared inspirational quotes. Resilia says its supplements are “manufactured in the USA with globally sourced ingredients.”

Sack did not respond to multiple emails, texts and calls requesting comment.

Early ads for Resilia, which first appeared on Google in 2025, resembled typical chumbox fare: grainy close-up images of golden capsules, exciting claims — “Works like magic!” — and promises of discounts that may be too good to be true (and probably were — many one-star reviews complained that it was nearly impossible to end a subscription to Resilia’s supplements, which reviewers claimed they didn’t know they signed up for).

Now the miracle cures are packaged in something that looks like entertainment. Publishing an ad over seven minutes long may seem like a counterintuitive approach to getting anyone to look at the ad in the first place, but the length of Resilia’s ad functions as a screening tool for potential customers, Teeny said: If they make it through the whole thing, they’re more likely to buy what it’s selling, he said.

The ads delay revealing the miracle supplement because they’re building a dramatic narrative, said Remi Daviet, an associate professor of marketing at INSEAD, an international business school.

“Stories persuade differently than arguments do, in part, by lowering people’s psychological resistance to persuasion when the actual appeal hits,” Teeny said.

Dietary supplements aren’t strictly regulated by the FDA, and on its site, Resilia says its products haven’t been evaluated by the agency. The health claims Resilia’s ads make range from murky — links between oregano oil and weight loss haven’t been rigorously supported by medical studies — to impossible, exaggerations invented by AI to sell the story.

“For most of advertising’s history, the scarce resource was airtime,” Daviet said. “Now it’s attention, and this ad treats attention as the entire product. The open question is whether attention bought with shock converts into trust for something people put in their bodies.”

在最近一则草药补品的网络广告开头，一个卡通园丁唱道：“我和一位犹太亿万富翁继承人的妻子发生了性关系，并让她告诉我家族的长寿秘诀。”

那错综复杂的淫秽、反犹主义、阴谋论和健康焦虑仅仅是开始。接下来的七分钟里，在人工智能训练模仿当代动画的诡异扁平的画面中，园丁得知他工作的庄园里，年迈的犹太居民经常食用陈年大蒜。他让年迈的父亲也开始食用大蒜后，却因为与雇主的妻子有染而被解雇。

视频播放到六分钟后才开始介绍它所销售的药品，即现成的蒜胶囊。

尽管这则广告看似莫名其妙，但类似的广告还有很多。在YouTube上成千上万条广告，以及Facebook上数百条广告中，卡通旁白唱着歌，讲述着如何揭开犹太人长寿或减肥的秘诀，或者讲述一位50多岁的黑人女性在体重增加后，丈夫出轨，她如何通过改变体型重塑身材，又或者讲述那些“吵闹”的意大利和希腊游轮乘客如何“吃得比船上任何人都多”，却依然保持苗条身材。所有这些广告都配以合成的、无伤大雅的流行音乐——所有广告都引导观众用牛至油或大蒜来解决各种各样的问题。

然而，这场广告攻势真正的关键在于人工智能。得益于几乎无需任何成本就能生成音乐动画视频的能力，负责制作这些短片的保健品公司Resilia在过去一年半的时间里，已在谷歌上投放了超过8000条广告，其中7000条出现在YouTube上，通常穿插在YouTube Shorts短片之间。目前，在Meta平台上还有大约480条广告。

在亚马逊上，Resilia是牛至保健品销量第一的品牌，该网站声称上个月其一款牛至产品的销量超过4万件。在6月份代表该公司就域名纠纷提起的诉讼中，该公司律师表示，Resilia每月平均收入为450万美元，自2024年底成立以来，已在市场营销方面投入了280万美元。

同一则广告的不同版本可能会对主角的种族或民族，或者他们面临的特定健康问题（比如体重增加、精力不足）进行一些细微的调整，但总体模式却始终如一：开头会抛出一些令人震惊的情节，例如性行为不检点或带有冒犯性的种族刻板印象，然后引出一个关于其他人如何保持苗条、长寿或拥有更多性生活的谜团。最后，经过一番铺垫和歌唱之后，会提到所谓的神奇产品及其生产公司。

西北大学市场营销学副教授雅各布·蒂尼（Jacob Teeny）研究消费者心理学和人工智能的影响，他表示，这些广告与它们声称要推广的草药补充剂只有间接关系，但它们可能确实在努力吸引观众对公司的关注。

蒂尼表示，这些“犹太亿万富翁”广告是绝佳的“生理唤起诱饵”，能在开场几秒钟内就引发人们的愤怒、厌恶和难以置信。他指出，那些令人费解的开场白“基于刻板印象和种族主义”，能够吸引观众，让他们带着（憎恨的）心情继续观看。

如果这则广告让他们感到非常冒犯，他们可能会在网上发布相关内容。“我们倾向于通过与他人分享来调节自己的生理反应，”他说。

模仿者们已经开始尝试复制Resilia的AI广告模式（只是去掉了音乐）。一家名为Lymphoria的健康保健品公司本月初发布了一则AI生成的广告，讲述一位中年女性因生殖器异味受到人事部门训诫，而据称可以通过淋巴引流草药滴剂治愈。Lymphoria的另一则广告开头是一位粗鲁的年轻黑人男子辱骂一位超重的老年男子，称其为“黑鬼”，并对其进行各种辱骂。（Lymphoria尚未对此事作出回应。专利文件中列出的公司所有者居住在中国，其美国专利律师也未作出回应。）

这则“犹太亿万富翁”广告至少有两个版本，一个版本由一位黑人女性主演，她为这个富裕家庭做住家保姆，急于减肥；另一个版本则由一位白人园艺师主演，他担心父亲的健康状况每况愈下。无论故事围绕减肥消肿还是健康老龄化展开，不变的是这个富裕家庭的犹太身份——其中一个版本反复描写某人戴着犹太小圆帽，画面中他们围坐在点燃烛台的餐桌旁享用犹太面包——他们秘密藏匿的保健品，以及一段听起来像是2015年流行电台播放的背景音乐。

上个月，X 平台上的一位用户转发了这两个版本的广告，浏览量达数百万次。（该用户随后删除了帖子。）谷歌和 Meta 均拒绝透露在其平台上观看广告的人数，但 X 平台上的帖子迅速传播表明，这些广告已被广泛看到。

在看过这些广告（包括犹太亿万富翁的广告）后，谷歌和 Meta 的代表都表示这些视频已被删除。

谷歌发言人表示：“我们不允许使用耸人听闻或令人震惊的手段来操纵观众的广告，我们的政策对所有广告一视同仁，无论其制作方式如何。我们已经移除了所有被举报违反政策的广告。”

谷歌表示，这些视频违反了包括禁止点击诱饵和“做出欺骗性健康声明或以不切实际的健康长寿承诺引诱用户”的广告在内的政策。

但谷歌声称已撤下的一则关于意大利和希腊游轮乘客的广告，第二天就再次出现在谷歌旗下的YouTube上。（谷歌发言人表示，公司正在调查这则重新出现的广告。该发言人还表示，2025年，违反政策的广告中只有不到1%能够上线。）

Meta在接到举报后移除了多条Resilia广告——9月中旬，该平台上约有1500条活跃的Resilia广告。现在已不足500条。Meta并未说明移除广告的原因是否违反了政策，也未具体说明这些广告违反了哪些政策。

Meta 和 Google 没有公开讨论这些广告的浏览次数，但成千上万个类似的、独立成篇的故事版本已被分享。

“不过，这则广告的制作者只关心观看次数（和购买次数），所以它的设计目的就是为了迎合这一点，”蒂尼说。

Teeny表示，生成式人工智能使得制作和测试这类广告的各种版本变得极其简单且成本低廉。广告商制作一段时长较长的动画音乐视频所需的时间甚至比观看视频本身所需的时间还要短，而且整个过程中除了向Claude或其他平台输入相应的提示信息外，无需任何人参与。

“现在，你不用花大价钱做一条广告，而是可以做20条奇奇怪怪的广告，然后让算法告诉你哪条有效，”蒂尼说道。这或许可以解释为什么那些“犹太亿万富翁”的广告感觉像是把各种毫不相干的故事情节拼凑在一起的肥皂剧。

凭借这项技术，这家曾经默默无闻的小公司 Resilia 在短短一年多的时间里，就成为了 Google 上无处不在的广告商。

Resilia于1月份注册为有限责任公司。其首席执行官Johnathan Sack同时也是Sack Consulting Inc.公司的注册人，该公司在谷歌上被列为Resilia广告背后的公司。6月份的诉状将Resilia描述为Sack Consulting Inc.旗下的“顶级品牌”。

这家公司（显然总部设在法国）的Facebook主页在2025年底之前一直处于不活跃状态，在此之前主要分享一些励志语录。Resilia公司声称其营养补充剂“在美国生产，原料来自全球各地”。

萨克没有回复多次要求置评的电子邮件、短信和电话。

Resilia 的早期广告于 2025 年首次出现在 Google 上，类似于典型的广告：金色胶囊的粗糙特写图片、激动人心的宣传语——“效果神奇！”——以及可能好得令人难以置信的折扣承诺（而且很可能确实如此——许多一星评论抱怨说，几乎不可能取消 Resilia 补充剂的订阅，评论者声称他们并不知道自己订阅了这些补充剂）。

如今，这些神奇疗法被包装成娱乐产品。发布长达七分钟的广告似乎与吸引人们观看广告的初衷背道而驰，但蒂尼表示，雷西利亚的广告时长起到了筛选潜在客户的作用：如果他们能看完，就更有可能购买广告中推销的产品。

欧洲工商管理学院 (INSEAD) 市场营销副教授雷米·达维特 (Remi Daviet) 表示，广告之所以迟迟不公布神奇的补充剂，是因为它们正在构建一个引人入胜的故事。

“故事的说服力与论证不同，部分原因是，当真正的吸引力发挥作用时，故事会降低人们对说服的心理抵抗力，”蒂尼说。

膳食补充剂不受美国食品药品监督管理局 (FDA) 的严格监管，Resilia 在其网站上声称其产品未经该机构评估。Resilia 广告中的健康宣传含糊不清——例如，牛至油与减肥之间的联系尚未得到医学研究的严格支持——甚至有些夸张离谱，完全是人工智能为了推销产品而编造出来的。

“在广告史的大部分时间里，稀缺资源是播出时间，”戴维特说。“现在稀缺资源是注意力，而这则广告将注意力视为全部产品。悬而未决的问题是，用耸人听闻的方式赢得的注意力能否转化为人们对某种进食产品的信任。”