Hi,
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is currently the talk of all industries. Everywhere you look, someone’s sharing the latest tool or promising that creativity is now just one prompt away.
At Vivaio, we’ve spent months actually testing that claim, creating hundreds of static and motion assets - refining, learning, and iterating. And what we’ve found is simple: AI is incredible, but it’s not as effortless as gurus make it sound.
Here’s our honest take on what it truly takes to create high-quality AI-powered content that is genuinely useful for day-to-day operations, particularly when applied to advertising, and on the real time and effort it requires.
Why Use AI in Advertising?
AI can unlock a serious creative advantage:
Faster exploration —> Quickly test visual directions, build moodboards, or create early assets without full shoots.
Cost-efficient experimentation —> Visualise ideas or scenarios without sets, locations, or models.
Creative scalability —> Once a look is set, generate consistent variations for different audiences and platforms.
Enhanced ideation —> Bring abstract ideas to life and iterate faster than manual sketching or mockups.
Greater accessibility—> Empower smaller teams to produce visuals once limited to big agencies.
Still, while the benefits are real, achieving them still demands creative judgement, iterations, and craft.
What the Workflow Actually Looks Like
While AI generation itself takes seconds, the creative workflow still follows a structured process.
At Vivaio, a single visual or video typically moves through these 5 steps:
Ideation & Concept Definition: Align creative direction with brand identity and campaign objectives.
Prompt strategy & Brand Input: Translate that concept into detailed, visually specific prompts.
Generation & Evaluation: Run multiple iterations across platforms to find the right tone and composition, then select and refine outputs to ensure accuracy and visual quality.
Post-production & Editing: Edit, retouch, colour correct, and add brand or motion elements.
Quality Check & Final Delivery: Review visuals for brand consistency, verify format and resolution, then export and deliver final files to the client.
As we’ve established, image generation can be done instantly, but turning that raw output into something polished, consistent, and visually strong takes real creative work. At Vivaio, crafting a polished static image typically takes 1 to 2 hours, and when combining AI-generated videos and real footage, the process can extend to 5 to 6 hours.
Those hours aren’t spent waiting on machines; they’re spent on direction, selection, correction, and refinement. It’s about making sure every frame aligns with the concept, the brand, and the emotion we want to evoke.
Case Study: rh+ x AI Video Experimentation
Exploring how blending real footage with AI-generated visuals can enhance brand storytelling.
Phase 1, Exploration: We began by generating videos from static product photos. The results were unstable, with faces, hands, and movements often appearing distorted, and textures lacking depth. While these tests revealed the potential of AI to create dynamic compositions quickly, they also highlighted its current limitations in realism and consistency, especially when applied to branded or human-focused content.
Phase 2, Integration: Mixing AI-generated scenes with real footage produced stronger, more balanced outcomes. While human figures still revealed the model’s limitations, AI excelled in generating environmental and atmospheric elements, enriching the real clips with added depth and visual texture. The result was a more grounded and cohesive narrative: real footage preserved authenticity, while AI added scale, tone, and ambience without the cost or complexity of additional shoots.
Phase 3, Refinement: In post-production, we unified tone and pacing through colour correction, editing, and sound design. Layering AI-generated landscapes and audio enriched the original footage and allowed easy creation of new variations, from the same source material.
The video above combines AI and real-life footage demonstrating how AI works best as a complement to real footage, extending a brand’s creative assets, not replacing production entirely.
Limitations & Best Practices
Even with impressive progress and sure that such progress will continue in the next months, AI content creation still has limitations.
AI cannot yet replace real photography or videography when brand accuracy matters, especially for products, logos, or human movement. While consistency remains a manual task, AI allows us to build on top of high-quality original content, extending and enhancing what already works. That said, effective use comes down to clarity, discipline, and a structured workflow.
When building AI-driven visuals, keep the following practices in mind:
Define a clear objective: What story or emotion should the image or video convey? Vague prompts lead to generic results; the better defined the concept, the fewer iterations needed.
Clarify the brand input: Ensure colour palette, tone, mood, and product accuracy are clearly communicated.
Plan the process: Decide whether the project will be AI-only, real-only, or hybrid. Determine what AI will generate and what will stay human.
Iterate deliberately: Keep what works, refine what doesn’t. Evaluate realism, lighting, and brand consistency. Generation is only valuable with structured selection.
Focus on the details: AI often misinterprets logos, labels, and textures; manual correction is still essential. Always review textures, proportions, and details before final delivery.
Mix real and AI elements: The strongest outputs often come from combining artificial clips with real footage.
Test across models: Each platform interprets prompts differently; comparing outputs across different models provides greater consistency and control over the final output.
At Vivaio, we continue to explore how AI can enhance creativity and production while sharing new insights and discoveries with our community. Explore our latest articles and subscribe to our bi-weekly newsletter to get it all delivered straight to your inbox.
