Will brands still need to shoot ads?
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I was looking at @Higgsfield and other AI video tools recently.
You can now create an ad without organizing a real shoot. Higgsfield also has tools specifically built to generate product ads from existing assets. A normal shoot means finding a location, people, equipment, then filming and editing everything. Now you can test different versions before doing any of that.
I don't think real shoots are going away, but I can see brands doing a lot less of them.
👉When would you still choose a real shoot over AI?
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I am not so sure. We used some AI and people spotted it and they personally wrote to us that because of AI they decided not to buy a product.
@busmark_w_nika Do you think this will change? AI is getting so good so fast that soon people might not even be able to tell.
@amraniyasser Depends on the format. People are more likely to engage / sympathetize e.g. with AI cartoonish characters. But when you try to fake humans and they recognise it, be careful with their reaction. :DD
Honestly I think the answer is changing because of what people actually respond to. I've noticed people relate more to low production, personal content. An iPhone video, bad audio, someone showing a product on their laptop. Not too branded. I can only speak for what makes me buy, but that's usually it.
AI can do so many cool things and brands will keep experimenting with it. But I think big productions will mostly disappear. The real shoots that stay will be the small, messy ones.
The part these threads keep skipping: generation got cheap, but distribution of the same ad across markets didn't. A shoot was never only the shoot — it was the shoot plus versioning it for every market you sell into.
That's where the actual saving sits now, and it's unglamorous work: burned-in captions per language, reading speed that a human can follow, subtitle files in the format each platform will actually accept. Most AI-video demos stop at the English master and quietly leave the expensive half undone.
So on "when would you still shoot for real" — when the ad carries a specific human you can't fake. A founder, a real customer. Everything else is heading toward generate once, version many.
I’d still do a real shoot when the product needs to feel real in someone’s hands. AI is great for testing ideas fast, but some stuff still needs the little details you only get from an actual shoot.