The Distance Between Idea And Execution Is Now Only This Big
Getting great ideas from someone’s brain to a finished ad used to be a marathon deploying legions of people. Account teams, planners, creatives, production houses, directors, editors—each step was a handoff, a checkpoint, a chance for things to slow down or go sideways. It was a process that could take weeks, sometimes months, and it wasn’t cheap.
Artificial intelligence is shrinking that marathon into a tiny little sprint. It’s more like “idea teleportation.” AI can take an idea and turn it into a fully realized video ad at dizzying speeds. The gap between idea and execution isn’t just closing—it’s practically gone. And that changes everything for advertising agencies.
Let’s take a quick look at how we got here, what’s happening now, and where I think this is all headed—especially for agencies like my own Ideasicle X, where human creativity is still the heart of the operation.
The Old Way: it took A Village to Make an Ad
Client wants a new campaign. Time was, the account team and planners huddle with them to understand the brand, the audience, the goals. They craft a creative brief—a document that’s part strategy, part poetry, designed to inspire the creative team. The creatives then lock themselves in a room for at least a few days (or, more likely these days, a few Zoom calls) and brainstorm. They come up with ideas, sketch them out as comps for print or storyboards for video, and present a handful to the client.
The client approves one and the real work begins. Production kicks in, and suddenly you’re dealing with directors, actors, cinematographers, editors, animators, sound engineers—the list goes on. Each person brings something vital. A 30-second TV spot could take weeks to shoot, edit, and polish. It was a beautiful, messy, human process, and a long road from that first idea to the final ad.
That road defined advertising agencies for decades. That road was where all the money was for agencies (time of staff), but it was also what made them indispensable. Then AI showed up and started rewriting the rules without a prompt.
Is it real? Are we real?
Fast-forward to today, and AI is doing things that would’ve sounded like science fiction a few years ago. Tools like Google’s Veo 3, unveiled at Google I/O 2025, can take a simple text prompt and spit out a video that looks like it was shot by a pro crew. I’m talking about videos with realistic people, accurate lip-syncing, ambient sounds, even dialogue that feels natural. These aren’t grainy CGI experiments—they’re so lifelike, they’re fooling people (real people, to be clear).
Take the following vide. It’s 100% not real using only Veo 3. The characters’ self-awareness of potentially being unreal is a nice touch and cements the point:
Now look at this one which compares Veo 3 to actual cinematic scenes:
You can find these on social media platforms like X—just search for “Veo 3 videos” and prepare to be stunned.
Compare that to last year’s Coca-Cola Christmas ad, which was 100% AI-generated. It was supposed to echo the magic of their 1995 “Holidays Are Coming” campaign, but it fell flat. People called it “creepy” and “soulless” on YouTube, with over 1,300 comments tearing into its lack of emotional depth. It was a bold experiment, but it showed AI’s limits at the time—great at mimicking humanity, not so great at capturing heart.
But that was less than a year ago!
With Veo 3, the gap between idea and execution is so small, it’s practically invisible. Theoretically, you can dream up a concept, type it into a prompt, and have a finished ad in minutes. No tissue sessions, no comps, no production house, no casting calls, no post-production marathon. Just an idea, and then—boom—a produced video.
It’s not quite there yet.
I talked to Ideasicle Expert, Matt Lindley, about Veo 3. He used to work at Google (I worked with him at Arnold) and knows all about AI and had been using Veo 2 for the last year. I love to pick his brain on this stuff. I knew he’d be knee-deep in Veo 3 and sure enough he was.
Turns out, while he is as blown away by the quality of Veo 3, there are still many limitations on what it can (and can’t) do that we need to keep in mind.
One is the length. Currently Veo 3 can only output 8 second videos. That’s why all the amazing samples you’ve seen are quick-cuts like the interview concept above. Another is accuracy. While they brag that these videos come from a single prompt (technically accurate), to get one 8 second video just right might take 30 different renderings—trials and errors—and the cost of that isn’t trivial with only so many tokens offered per month.
As Matt says,
Matt Lindley
“Veo3 is pretty dazzling. Simple to use. Quick results. The big wait-and-see are the pass-along costs associated with AI’s power requirements. When the dust settles, how many tokens, how many renders, at what cost, actually makes a spot agencies can be proud of.”
To his point, did you see that Microsoft is making a deal to help restart Three Mile Island? More on that here.
So the true threat to advertising agencies is still a little ways away. But let’s fast forward a bit.
What This Means for the future of Ad Agencies
Let’s pretend that one creative prompt can output a killer :30 TV spot with a push of a button. I’ll let you decide how far off that will be, but for the sake of argument, let’s say it’s here now. What would that mean?
The people in the future agency:
Production: all producers, photographers, directors, DPs, grips, actors, editors, lighting people, make-up artists, and even the food caterers are no longer needed.
Strategy: we will still need good brand planners and account people, just not as many.
Creative: same, we’ll still need good creatives (writers, art directors, and designers) to come up with the ideas, as AI hasn’t come close in that department yet. Judging from a recent project we did for Hallmark (case study), where the entire campaign was produced with nothing but AI by art director, Rich Wallace, I see art directors becoming the resident AI experts. Photoshop is child’s play compared to what’s coming in AI. But it’ll be the visual creatives—the art directors and designers—who will need to (and hopefully want to) master the AI prompting for maximum visual accuracy and effect.
Further, while we’re at it, the people in the future agency will not need to be in cities, in buildings, or even in the same state in order to be effective.
The creative process in the future:
A client needs a campaign for a new product. The creative team brainstorms, lands on a killer concept, and instead of drawing storyboards, they create a prompt for the idea and key it into an AI tool. Minutes later, they’ve got a polished 30-second spot, complete with actors, music, and voice-over. They show it to the client, client loves it, and they’re done. No weeks of production, no back-and-forth with directors.
The production process is over in the creative presentation. Think about that.
That’s the future of advertising agencies—or at least, the ones that want to survive. Agencies that cling to the old ways, with their existing production pipelines, will struggle to keep up. I think the ones that embrace AI while doubling down on human creativity will thrive.
The Human Edge: Ideas Still Matter
No level of AI video production is worth anything without a great idea for it to execute. No amount of polishing will help a turd. At Ideasicle X, we’ve built our model around this truth. Our virtual teams of four humans dive deep, challenge each other, and find those rare creative ideas that stick. AI can’t replicate that kind of human alchemy, at least not yet. And when we pair those ideas with AI’s ability to execute instantly, we’ve got something wildly powerful: a process that’s both deeply human and lightning-fast.
But there’s a catch. As AI gets better, there’s a risk of agencies leaning too heavily on it, churning out cookie-cutter ads that lack soul. We’ve got to stay vigilant, nurturing our very-human creative instincts and using AI as a tool, not a crutch. The future isn’t about AI replacing humans—it’s about humans and AI working together, each doing what they do best.
The future looks a lot like…
If I had to predict, I’d say the advertising agency of tomorrow might look a lot like what we’re building at Ideasicle X, though I admit it’s by accident. I didn’t see AI being this good back in 2010 when I started Ideasicle X. But the future agency could be about small, nimble teams of strategic and creative humans generating bold ideas, paired with AI tools that turn those ideas into finished ads in a heartbeat.
There are challenges, of course. Ethical concerns, like the potential for deepfakes, are real. YouTube’s already requiring labels for AI-generated videos, and that’s just the start. We’ll need to be transparent about what’s AI and what’s human, especially as the lines blur.
For those of us who love this business, it’s an exciting time. We humans get to focus on what we humans are best at—coming up with ideas that surprise, delight, and connect—while letting AI handle more and more of production’s heavy lift. The gap between idea and execution is nearly gone, and that opens up a world of possibilities.
So, what do you think? Are we ready for an advertising world where ideas and ads are one and the same? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.
Will Burns is the Founder & CEO of the revolutionary virtual-idea-generating company, Ideasicle X. He’s an advertising veteran from such agencies as Wieden & Kennedy, Goodby Silverstein, Arnold Worldwide, and Mullen. He was a Forbes Contributor for nine years writing about creativity in modern branding. Sign up for the Ideasicle Newsletter and never miss a post like this. Will’s bio.