Byrna AI Ads: The Banana Spot Byrna Called AI-Created, and Its 50% Claim

Byrna put the AI label on its own spot

Are Byrna's commercials AI? By Byrna's own account, one of them is. In a release dated August 25, 2025, Byrna called its "We Don't Sell Bananas" spot an "AI-Created Commercial," and the same release credited a new AI advertising process with a 50% rise in daily visits to Byrna.com.

The pages that rank for this question won't tell you that. They're ad-tracker listings, a viewer's re-upload, a dealer's blog post and forum threads we couldn't open. None of the ones we could read quotes what Byrna said its process did or what it reported afterward, and none says what a spot like it costs to make with the models available today.

So we went to Byrna's own releases, SEC filings and YouTube uploads, which we read from Spain on November 8, 2026. We also priced the spot's length against one render of our own. We made nothing for Byrna, and we didn't try to rebuild its spot.

What Byrna's release and 10-K say about the spot

Byrna described the same campaign in two places, its August 2025 release and its annual report for fiscal 2025, and they use different words. If you're asking whether a model made the ad, that gap matters.

One subheadline carries the AI-created label

Byrna's investor site runs the release under the headline "Byrna Reports 50% Surge in Average Daily Web Visits Following Launch of New AI Advertising Process." Below it are two subheadlines, and the second reads "Byrna's 'We Don't Sell Bananas' AI-Created Commercial Surpasses 66 Million Views." That's the only place in the release where the words AI-created appear.

The body of the release says less. It calls the spot "the first campaign produced under this new ad creation process," and it describes that process as a "proprietary creative content development process that draws upon a number of new AI-based tools." It doesn't name a single one of those tools, or any model, vendor or agency.

It's more specific about what the process was for. By Byrna's account, the process let the company "generate professional-quality commercials in days rather than weeks, continuously refresh content, and A/B test multiple variations at scale," and adapt its creative "more quickly to the requirements of the cable networks where the content is running." Bryan Ganz, the CEO at the time, said in the release that it let Byrna "produce compelling ads faster, test and optimize these ads more effectively, and expand our reach across cable networks at a significantly lower cost than traditional methods."

So "AI-Created" is Byrna's word for its own spot, in its own release. We take it as a label for the process behind the spot. Nothing we read from Byrna says how the spot was made, or how much of it a model produced.

How the 10-K worded it in February 2026

Byrna's annual report for fiscal 2025, signed February 5, 2026, talks about a system rather than a spot. It says Byrna "deployed a proprietary AI-assisted advertising system designed to automate creative generation, audience targeting, content iteration, and bid optimization." It also says Byrna joined its broadcast ads to "our AI-driven advertising system to automate creative testing, audience targeting, content optimization, and media buying across digital and streaming platforms."

The banana passage itself has no AI word. It reads, "In 2024, we launched a nationally recognized television and digital campaign referred to internally as the 'Banana' campaign." The 10-K never calls the spot AI-created, but it doesn't walk back the release, either.

Three start dates, all from Byrna

Byrna's own pages give three different starts for the campaign, and an ad tracker adds a fourth date.

• The release says the campaign "debuted in early August," which means August 2025.
• Byrna uploaded the 30-second spot, titled "At Byrna, We Don't Sell Bananas," to its YouTube channel on July 22, 2025.
• The 10-K puts the launch in 2024, though Byrna's annual report for fiscal 2024 doesn't mention a banana campaign at all.
• iSpot's listing for a 30-second Byrna spot titled "Banana" has a page date of June 24, 2025. That's when iSpot published its page, which may not be when the spot first aired.

Byrna's releases name only "We Don't Sell Bananas," so we can't tell you whether that iSpot listing is the same cut. We're not picking one of these dates, either. Byrna's own pages disagree, and nothing we read settles it.

Byrna had mentioned AI tools before the upload, too. In its fiscal second-quarter results on July 10, 2025, it wrote that "we've begun integrating AI tools into our content production."

The traffic and view numbers Byrna reported

Byrna published numbers about the campaign in three statements between August and October 2025, and they don't quite line up. So we give each figure with the statement it came from. Byrna's fiscal year ends November 30, so its August figures fall in its fiscal third quarter.

Daily sessions, statement by statement

Byrna statement	Period	Daily sessions on Byrna.com
Release, August 25, 2025	December 1 to July 31	about 33,400
Release, August 25, 2025	first 21 days of August	more than 50,000, up 50%
Release, September 4, 2025	July	about 36,000
Release, September 4, 2025	August	about 52,000, up 45%
Results, October 9, 2025	before the campaign	33,000 average
Results, October 9, 2025	August	more than 50,000
Results, October 9, 2025	September	58,000

The headline's 50% compares the first 21 days of August with the December-to-July average. The release credits the campaign with the jump and calls the result "the highest level in the Company's history." The September statement compares August with July instead, which is why it gives 45%.

Amazon, sales and conversion

Byrna described the Amazon jump two different ways, and its sales and conversion figures came with time windows of their own.

• The August 25 release said Amazon sessions were up 75% over their 2025 average in the first 21 days of August.
• The October 9 results said August's Amazon sessions were up 70% over the pre-campaign average.
• The August 25 release said Byrna.com sales rose 31% in the first 21 days of August, compared with the 21 days before.
• The September 4 release said online conversion climbed 57% in the final ten days of August, to 0.9%.

Ganz tied the late-August sales jump to Byrna's marketing. In the September 4 release, he said Byrna saw "a significant sales spike toward the end of August across all domestic channels due to our innovative AI-supported marketing approach."

What the cost per visitor measures

The release's only dollar figures are costs per website visitor. Byrna said the spot drove traffic at $0.53 a visitor. It compared that with $0.94 a visitor for "Byrna's iconic 'How It Works' campaign," and called the difference "a 43% savings."

Those figures measure what it cost to bring visitors to the site. None of the Byrna pages we read says what the spot itself cost to make.

Views, as Byrna counted them

The release's second subheadline puts the spot past 66 million views, and the body says it "has been viewed more than 66 million times." The release doesn't say where those views were counted. The 10-K gives a different, rounder figure for the whole campaign, "more than 60 million organic views across television, streaming, and digital channels."

Byrna's other spots, and a pitch that isn't Byrna's

Byrna has run other spots, and the pages that rank for this question list several of them side by side. Only one of them carries Byrna's AI label.

The only spot Byrna tied to AI

In every Byrna release we read, the only spot named beside the word AI is "We Don't Sell Bananas." Ganz said as much on Byrna's earnings call of October 9, 2025, when he called it "the first campaign we created with the help of AI," as the Motley Fool's transcript renders his words. A note on that transcript says parts of it were created using large language models.

Byrna's other spots don't carry the word. The release mentioned its "How It Works" campaign only as the cost comparison, and Byrna's YouTube channel has a 37-second video with a matching title, "The Un-Gun: Byrna SD / How It Works," uploaded January 6, 2023. Byrna Betty, the company's other campaign from the summer of 2025, appears in Byrna's year-end highlights video as one of "a couple of our ad campaigns" that "went viral over the summer," and that video's description doesn't mention AI.

What iSpot lists

iSpot's pages for Byrna's TV spots are among the top results, and none of them says AI made a spot. We read six of them on November 8, 2026.

Spot, as iSpot titles it	Length	iSpot page date
Peace of Mind	30 seconds	June 14, 2024
Banana	30 seconds	June 24, 2025
Banana	30 seconds	August 18, 2025
My Defense	30 seconds	September 29, 2025
Holidays: Wrong House	30 seconds	December 1, 2025
This Banana: Veteran	30 seconds	May 12, 2026

The dates are when iSpot published each page, which may not be when a spot first aired, and iSpot keeps its airing figures locked. None of the Byrna statements we read calls any of these spots AI-made. And because Byrna's releases name only "We Don't Sell Bananas," we can't match either "Banana" listing to that cut.

A viewer's #ai tags, a spec deck and threads we couldn't open

The second result for the question is a re-upload of a Byrna spot, posted to YouTube on August 25, 2025, by an account that isn't Byrna's. The uploader tagged it #ai and #artificialintelligence. Those tags are one viewer's label, and they tell you nothing about how Byrna made the spot.

There's also "The Mark," a pitch deck on FlippingBook for a 30-second Byrna spec spot by Stephen Guy, founder of planet581 media. The deck names its AI tools (MidJourney, Runway, OpenArt, ChatGPT and Eleven Labs), which is more than Byrna has done on any page we read. A spec spot is an unsolicited pitch, and nothing we read from Byrna mentions this one. So its tool list tells you how planet581 made its pitch and nothing about Byrna's ads.

Five forum threads about Byrna's ads also rank for the question. We couldn't open any of them, so we've left out what viewers thought of the spots.

Where Byrna's AI ad process stood by October 2026

The newest Byrna statement we read is dated October 8, 2026. By then, the people around the process had changed, and so had the wording.

Byrna's 2026 Super Bowl plan for the spot

Byrna still had plans for the spot in 2026. On February 5, 2026, it said it would run "We Don't Sell Bananas" during the Super Bowl "in a local test market." That release names the spot without the word AI, while the 10-K Byrna signed the same day still described an "AI-assisted advertising system."

The people behind the process left

In March 2026, Byrna said Bryan Ganz, who announced the process, was retiring. In June, it said Luan Pham, whom it had credited with its AI-driven ad strategies, would leave his role as president.

• On March 3, 2026, Byrna said Ganz was retiring as CEO and from its board. It named Conn Davis as his successor and said Ganz would stay on as an advisor for up to six months.
• On March 19, Byrna promoted Pham, its marketing chief since January 2021, to president, and credited him with developing "AI-driven advertising strategies that unlocked new marketing channels in a constrained environment."
• On June 15, Byrna realigned its sales and marketing function, said Pham would "depart from his role as president," and named HLK its agency of record for "brand strategy, repositioning, creative development, and media and social strategy."

What Byrna said later about traffic and spending

Under Davis, Byrna's statements about its website changed tone, and its marketing spending shifted, too.

• On April 9, 2026, Davis said traffic had "remained relatively healthy, but conversion has declined and average order value has come under pressure in recent months." On that day's call, as the Motley Fool's transcript has it, he said Byrna was "shortening and improving the effectiveness of our creative so it is more impactful."
• On July 9, he said, "In e-commerce, web traffic remained weak."
• On September 29, Byrna said it was moving ad spend within its iHeartMedia portfolio "toward programming with broader mainstream reach," through national radio endorsements, podcast integrations and digital media placements.
• On October 8, Byrna's 10-Q for the quarter that ended August 31, 2026, attributed a $1.2 million rise in marketing expenses, compared with the same quarter a year earlier, mainly to "broadcast, audio and connected TV advertising and fees for marketing agencies."

The newest traffic figure came the same day. Davis said Byrna "averaged over 29,000 website sessions per day in August, the highest since March of this year," and credited "increasing engagement across our digital channels, onboarding creators to our social engagement program, and launching new media partnerships." A year earlier, Byrna had reported more than 50,000 a day for August 2025. Byrna doesn't connect the two figures, and we can't say what moved them.

Byrna put out 18 releases after Pham's promotion, through October 8, 2026. None of them uses the word AI, and artificial intelligence comes up once, in an executive's biography.

What a 30-second spot costs to make in Novoads

Prices as of November 8, 2026.

Byrna never said what its spot cost to make, so we can't compare budgets. What we can price is its length. Byrna's upload runs 30 seconds, and since nothing we read describes its shots, our math matches that length and nothing else. If you want more than one spot to go on, our guide to AI commercials walks through four real examples.

One Seedance 2.5 take, at 720p or 1080p

With Seedance 2.5, you can render all 30 seconds as one take. At 720p, that's 210 credits in Novoads. At 1080p, it's 360.

Plus is $49 a month for 1,000 credits. That makes each Plus credit worth $0.049. Starter is $15 a month for 200 credits. A Starter credit works out to $0.075.

Model	What you render	Credits	At Plus's rate	Fits a Starter month
Seedance 2.5	one 30 s take, 720p	210	$10.29	no
Seedance 2.5	one 30 s take, 1080p	360	$17.64	no
Google Veo 3.1	four clips, 72 each	288	$14.11	no
Omni Flash	three 10 s clips, 720p	90	$4.41	yes, twice

At Starter's rate, the 720p take would cost $15.75, but a Starter month doesn't have enough credits for it. A Plus month covers four of those takes, so you could test a few versions against each other, which is what Byrna said its process let it do.

A 20-second brand film from one prompt

The closest real render we have is a 20-second brand film, two-thirds the length of Byrna's spot. On September 8, 2026, we gave Seedance 2.5 one timestamped prompt for a vertical film about a running brand we made up around our N mark, with no dialogue. The prompt asked for eight shots. The film came back with seven cuts, each within half a second of a timestamp in the prompt. The kit, the shoes and the logo stayed the same in every shot, and the render took 7 minutes 12 seconds. The same 20 seconds costs 140 credits today.

Made in Novoads with Seedance 2.5 · one prompt with timestamps, a 20-second 9:16 film at 720p for a mock running brand on our N mark, eight shots and seven cuts · 140 credits at today's price · rendered 2026-09-08

This film has nothing to do with Byrna's spot, and we're not suggesting Byrna made its spot this way. We're showing it because it's a real multi-shot film from one prompt and one model, at a length close to a TV spot's.

Google Veo 3.1 and Omni Flash

In Novoads, Google Veo 3.1 costs a flat 72 credits a clip, with sound on, at every length and resolution we offer for it. Its clips run up to 8 seconds, so you need four to cover Byrna's length. That's 288 credits, and a Starter month has enough for two Veo 3.1 clips. For the same 8-second Veo 3.1 clip in another editor's credits, see our Picsart pricing breakdown.

Omni Flash, the model our editor opens with, costs the least of the three. Its 10-second clips are 30 credits each at the default resolution. Three of them cover 30 seconds. At Starter's rate, that set costs $6.75, so a Starter month covers it twice.

Of the three, Seedance 2.5 is the only one that covers 30 seconds in a single take. With the other two, you have to cut clips together.

What the credits don't cover

These figures are for video only. A finished TV spot usually needs more, and none of it is in the table.

• A voice-over or music.
• An end card.
• An edit that puts the takes together.
• Paying to air the ad, which is a separate bill from making it.
• Takes that miss. They cost the same as takes that land, so if the first 720p Seedance 2.5 take isn't right, the next one is another 210 credits.

Our post on AI video ad cost goes through what real ads have cost in credits.

You make the clips in Novoads and run the ad wherever you buy media. Every plan is paid from the first month, and our pricing page lists them all.

Our pricing page with Monthly selected, showing Starter, Plus and Ultra with their monthly credits, captured 2026-11-08

For two other brands' AI ads, read how Kalshi made its spots and then pulled back and what critics spotted in Skechers' ads.