The new frontier for ads is racist cartoon AI musical microdrama

By Scottie Andrew, CNN

(CNN) — “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.”

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