Michael Bismuth and Kev Cohen joined Kia Johnson on the DesignRush Podcast to talk about what AI actually costs a brand. The episode went live on 28 October 2026, alongside a companion piece DesignRush published under the title Is Your Marketing Team Burning Cash on AI?

The premise is simple. Nearly two in three digital video ad buyers now use generative AI in creative production, up from about half a year earlier, according to the IAB. Generating has never been cheaper. The conversation was about everything that happens after the generating.

The idea comes before the image

A campaign is a story of feeling, not of beauty. "The idea is the most important, because this is what will make the viewer feel something." Direction comes first, and no model supplies it. As Michael put it: "It can generate, but it can't direct. Direction and taste are the most important things nowadays."

Taste is what you leave out

A model returns a thousand options in the time it takes to write the brief. That abundance is not the work. "Taste is what you are going to select out of a thousand options. This is what defines your taste."

AI is cheap to generate, but it is expensive to get right.

Knowing when to stop

Not every shot should be generated. On one campaign the brief called for a bicycle with a wheel missing, and no amount of prompting held it together. “It just looked like a bunch of messed pixels.” The answer was to build the object in 3D, lock the geometry and the camera move, and let AI handle surface, light and environment on top. The same hybrid method produced the Karl Lagerfeld holiday campaign with no physical shoot at all.

The risk runs the opposite way to what people expect. "Sometimes using AI will make us waste time, because we are trying so hard."

More out of a shoot you already paid for

The clearest return is rarely a cheaper production. It is a wider one. On BIGFACE, Michael generated backgrounds and props live while Kev was shooting, so a single day produced several campaigns worth of material. DKNY had the photography and no videographer on set, so we animated the campaign images the brand already owned.

"Not always saving time or not always saving money, but just getting more outputs."

What brands are actually afraid of

The fear was never the technology. "Nowadays they are not afraid of AI. They are afraid that it shows." That is the whole job: work finished to the point where the tool stops being the subject.

The full episode is on YouTube, and the DesignRush write-up is here.