Creative & Content

The Future of Commercial Production Is Hybrid

There is a fairly uncomfortable equation facing the marketing industry right now; budgets are getting more challenging, timelines are getting shorter, brands need more content across more channels, and yet the ambition of the creative brief hasn’t disappeared (and nor should it).

Nobody wants the cheaper version of the great idea, so how can we pivot from simply cutting the cost of production and marketing to being more creative about how we achieve our goals?

I believe the answer is hybrid production.

Put simply, hybrid production means integrating generative AI and virtual production into the traditional live-action process. I am not advocating for ridding the world of human creativity and reducing our industry to AI-only content.

What I am advocating for is the intelligent integration of new creative technologies that can help brands solve problems that can’t always be achieved through a traditional shoot pipeline, while delivering high-end, authentic campaigns at scale.

There’s an inevitable tendency to pit new technologies against what feels comfortable and familiar.

Will AI replace shoots? Will virtual production replace locations? Will directors, photographers, or VFX artists be displaced by a new generation of tools?

Absolutely not, because human creativity and taste are crucial to any artistic project. Live action shoots and human processes are as important as ever, but virtual production and generative AI open up possibilities that would previously have been prohibitively expensive, time-consuming, or simply impossible to produce.

Procurement teams are understandably under enormous pressure to demonstrate value, and new production technologies offer very real opportunities to create efficiencies.

But we need to be careful about equating efficiency with simply making things cheaper. The cheapest way to produce an asset is not necessarily the best value if the result isn’t very good.

We’ve seen this conversation play out around generative AI. Because it can make certain types of execution faster or more accessible, there is an assumption that its primary value is cost reduction, positioning AI as a replacement for creative expertise rather than another tool in the hands of that expertise.

Good generative AI work still requires human creative direction, taste, storytelling, iteration, and craft. The opportunity isn’t to remove talented people from the process until we reach the lowest possible number on a spreadsheet, it’s to give them more ways to solve the brief.

For procurement, that can mean getting more creative value from the available investment, protecting elements that matter to the audience while finding smarter ways to execute those that don’t need to be produced traditionally.

This thinking has shaped what we’re building at Imagine This Group.

We believe brands don’t buy production disciplines, they buy creative solutions. That’s why we’ve chosen to invest in an ecosystem of specialist studios across production, generative AI, and virtual production that can offer solutions a traditional company simply couldn’t.

There is another reason this model is increasingly relevant to brands and procurement teams: the sheer volume of content brands are now expected to produce.

A single hero asset is rarely enough. Campaigns need to work across platforms, formats, markets, languages, audiences, and cultural moments, without an equivalent increase in production budgets.

Utilising hybrid production, a beautifully shot piece of live action can become the creative foundation rather than the limit of what was captured during a few days on set.

Virtual environments, generative workflows, and post-production techniques can extend that world and create additional assets without treating every execution as an entirely separate production.

More content is not automatically better content, but where scale genuinely serves the media or creative strategy, the production model needs to deliver it without multiplying cost at exactly the same rate.

Production has always been creative problem solving. A good producer looks at an ambitious idea, the available money, time, people, and inevitable complications, then figures out how to make it happen. The difference now is that their toolkit is expanding dramatically.

This shift means procurement has an opportunity to re-think their supplier strategy accordingly.

If production continues to be bought through rigid discipline-based categories, we risk preserving commercial structures that don’t reflect how the strongest work can now be made.

The more interesting question isn’t simply which supplier can deliver a predefined execution for the lowest cost, but which production partner can find the smartest route from creative ambition to finished work.

The pressure on budgets isn’t going away, and neither is the ambition of creative people. I don’t think the answer is a future where everything is generated by AI, shot on an LED volume, or made using whichever technology happens to be attracting attention that year.

It’s much more practical than that.

Live action when live action is the best answer. Generative AI when it opens a creative possibility. Virtual production when it gives us greater control or flexibility. Increasingly, combinations of all of them.

The future of advertising production isn’t about choosing which discipline wins. It’s about having enough creative.

About the author

Isabelle du Plessis, Chief Growth Officer at The Imagine This Group