The Great Reversal: Ideas Are Cheap. Making Is Everything.

By Dave Jansen, Chief Imagination Officer & Founding Partner, Connecting Plots

 

AI just handed everyone a production company. You can write a script, generate the visuals, direct a scene, score it, edit it and have the whole thing online before lunch.

Incredible. There’s just one problem. Most of it isn’t very good.

I’ve seen plenty of agencies experimenting with AI recently. Technically impressive. Beautifully rendered. Slick as hell. But I’m not feeling anything. And I think I know why. Most agencies don’t actually know how to make.

I have a slightly unusual perspective on this. I’m a creative leader in an agency, but I’ve also owned and operated a production company. I’ve spent my career on both sides of a divide our industry created between the people who have ideas and the people who make them. And I think we built that relationship backwards.

The hierarchy has always been clear. The agency has the idea. Then somebody else “executes” it. Even that word tells you everything.

The valuable bit apparently happened in the agency. A writer and art director cracked the concept, turned it into a script and eventually handed their genius to a director, editor, photographer or designer to bring to life.

What bollocks.

Anyone who has actually made things knows ideas change through making. The casting changes them. Performance changes them. Editing changes them. Music changes them. Accidents change them. Making isn’t what happens after the idea. Making is where the idea becomes good.

I’ve worked on plenty of average ideas that became great pieces of work. Not because the idea magically got better. Because a great director got hold of it. They found something in the casting. Changed a performance. Reworked a scene. Killed a line. Added a pause. Made a hundred tiny decisions that transformed something pretty ordinary on a page into something people actually gave a shit about.

Ideas are becoming abundant.

AI isn’t just democratising production. It’s democratising ideation.

Want 50 headlines? Done.

Twenty scripts? Done.

A hundred campaign territories? Give it a minute.

Ideas, or things that look suspiciously like ideas, are becoming infinite.

So what happens to an industry that spent decades putting most of its value on coming up with them? The scarce skill shifts. Taste. Judgement. Craft. Making.

You can already see the problem in a lot of AI experimentation. Everything moves. Everything glows. Cameras fly through impossible spaces. People morph into animals. Products levitate. And after six seconds… Cool. Then what?

Audiences don’t care what our tools can do. They care what something makes them feel. Make me laugh. Make me uncomfortable. Make me cry. Make me send it to someone.
Agencies have spent years hollowing out exactly this capability. We brought production in-house in the name of efficiency. But we didn’t necessarily build cultures of makers. Too often, agency production teams are just an asset factory sitting downstream from creative.

If your production proposition is fundamentally about making things cheaper and faster, I’ve got bad news. A machine just beat you at your own strategy. When everyone has access to extraordinary tools, access stops being the advantage.

A great filmmaker with AI is still a great filmmaker. A great editor still understands tension. A great comedian still understands timing. A great director still understands performance.

AI accelerates those instincts. It doesn’t magically give them to someone who never developed them (giving everyone an iPhone didn’t turn everyone into Spielberg..).

Tools democratise output. They don’t democratise taste. Which means agencies need to rethink who gets to create.

Maybe the default creative team isn’t always an art director and copywriter. Maybe it’s a writer and director. A strategist and editor. A designer and comedian. A filmmaker and technologist. Put makers at the beginning, not at the end.

Because this is the Great Reversal.

For decades, advertising treated the idea as king and execution as servant. That hierarchy is collapsing. When ideas become abundant, making becomes scarce.

AI gave everyone a production company. It didn’t give everyone taste, timing and judgement. Or the ability to make a stranger stop halfway through their feed on a Tuesday afternoon and actually feel something. That’s still the job.

And after decades of treating makers as the people who execute the idea, perhaps we’re finally going to understand what the great ones knew all along.

The making was the idea.

Read Connecting Plots’ New Wave Q&A here.

 

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