How Small Studios Are Beating Big Agencies on AI Creative Work

I've been watching the agency side of AI creative and the model is already fracturing.

The big agencies are adding "AI capabilities" to their pitch decks which really just means they're using the same tools everyone has and charging a markup for it. And meanwhile small studios with actual creative directors — people who've spent real time in writers rooms and edit bays — are making better work at a fraction of the cost with maybe 5 people.

The agencies will hold on for a while because of existing relationships and because switching is a hassle. But the math doesn't lie. When a CMO sees comparable quality from a small studio at $5K versus what they were getting from their agency at $50K, that conversation changes and it changes fast.

I think the future here isn't big agencies with AI departments tacked on. The overhead that justified agency pricing — the offices, the layers of account managers, the rounds of approvals — none of that makes the work better. It just makes it cost more. And when the production itself gets cheap, all that overhead starts looking like what it always was.