There was a time, not so long ago, when filming a high-end commercial meant a small army of people, several weeks of logistics, and a budget that could make a CFO’s eyes water. You needed location scouts, lighting technicians, craft catering, and, if you were feeling ambitious, maybe a permit to shut down a city street. But look around lately, and you might notice something has fundamentally shifted. That “army” is being replaced by a single creative director sitting in front of a high-end workstation.
We’re essentially witnessing the era of the 90% discount in advertising. This isn’t just a matter of things moving a bit faster; it’s more like watching the old way of building and paying for things get completely taken apart.
Take a look at how companies are pivoting. Not long ago, Lottoland released a 20-second spot that looked like something out of a big-budget fever dream—think weddings on beaches, unicorns, and a man in a regal cape arriving at a stadium in a limousine. Ordinarily, pulling that off would involve complex CGI teams or expensive travel. Instead, they leaned into AI-driven production. The result? They reportedly produced the ad for about 10% of what a traditional shoot would have cost.
It’s a bit of a wake-up call, isn’t it? When a brand can get 100% of the visual impact for 10% of the price, the “future of work” in marketing starts to look very different. We aren’t just talking about a niche experiment anymore. We’ve reached a point where the barrier to entry for “cinematic” quality has basically just… vanished.
Why the Old Model is Stuttering
Traditional agencies are built on overhead. You’re paying for the office in Soho, the account managers, and the layers of middle-management approval. AI doesn’t care about overhead. Current tools can now generate consistent characters, realistic lighting, and even professional-grade voiceovers in a fraction of the time.
But does this mean the “human” element is dead? Probably not. If anything, the pressure has just shifted somewhere else. When the “doing” becomes cheap, the “thinking” becomes the only thing truly worth the invoice. You still need someone to say, “Hey, let’s put a unicorn on that beach,” even if you no longer need a hundred people to help actually get it there.
A New Kind of Creative
There’s a legitimate worry, of course, about what happens to all those specialized roles. If a solo creator can do the work of a production house for a few thousand pounds—or even a few hundred—where does that leave the traditional career path?
It feels like we’re heading into an era of the “Generalist.” The most valuable people in the room won’t be the ones who’ve mastered a specific camera, but the ones who know how to pull the levers of these new models to tell a story that feels human rather than like a digital hallucination.
It’s messy, and it’s certainly moving faster than most people expected. It’s like we’re watching an entire industry’s pricing manual being tossed into a shredder in real-time.
What do you think—does an ad lose its soul when it’s generated by code rather than a film crew, or at the end of the day, do you only care about what’s on the screen? Let us know your thoughts in the comments!
