Do you know Guillermo Navarro? If you’ve seen Pan’s Labyrinth, you’ve seen his work. An Oscar for cinematography, thirty years beside Guillermo del Toro. Not really the profile of the guy who tinkers with AI ads in his garage.
And yet. This week, he launches Kaitoi with engineers who have passed through Industrial Light & Magic, Apple, Google and IBM. An AI-powered advertising production platform. And I love what they’re doing with it.
Their promise isn’t “an ad in three clicks.” It’s smarter than that. You build a workflow once, and you replay it infinitely. Their example: a regional network creates a 20-second spot for a car dealership. The next day, the same workflow, another dealer. We change the car, the offer, the city, the character. The creative structure and the brand rules, they stay untouched. The decisions stay human. The machine runs it.
For whom? Broadcasters, streaming platforms, retail media, marketplaces. All those who have hundreds of advertisers to serve and not one agency for each.
That’s why it resonates with me. For three years, I’ve been saying that AI serves creation when it industrializes know-how, not when it replaces it. Here, an Oscar-winning cinematographer lends his eye to a reproducible system. It’s not the craft that retreats. It’s the craft that scales up.
And if that’s what real democratization looks like: not AI for everyone, but talent for everyone?
Look at what they’ve already produced. My favorite, an ad for a vintage sneakers brand that doesn’t exist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHjhrx-BQEI And a spot for a fictitious sports brand, ten amateurs in ten locations on the same day: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkabPmkNz2I
What do you think? Craft at scale, is it a promise or a threat?
#AI #Advertising #AdvertisingCreation #GenerativeAI #AdvertisingProduction #Marketing #AIAdvertising