AIGC (Generative Artificial Intelligence) is currently widely applied across various fields, bringing new vitality and transformation to the advertising industry. How to integrate education with industry practices and fully leverage the advantages of AIGC in both education and industry remains a crucial issue for advertising education. Based on the 2024 higher education practical course “AIGC Advertising Creativity and Design,” this study explores the cognitive shifts and skill enhancement brought about by AIGC in advertising creativity and design for students from different professional backgrounds, cultivating critical thinking abilities. It also considers the practical role and limitations of AIGC in real advertising design projects, guided by industry mentors. The research shows that AIGC significantly enhances the creativity of students from various disciplines. Most students maintain a rational attitude toward the use of AIGC tools in advertising creativity, viewing them as auxiliary tools, with human creativity still at the core of advertising design. Through human-machine collaboration, AIGC can effectively improve the efficiency and quality of the creative process while cautioning against machine bias. Participation in real projects has notably increased students’ awareness of copyright and ethical issues. Due to concerns over copyright and the instability of outputs, AIGC-generated content is difficult to directly apply to final outcomes. The integration of industry and education has driven innovation in advertising design education, potentially becoming an important pathway for nurturing future advertising creatives and offering new research and application directions for AIGC’s development.