Do clients have to agree before an agency uses AI?

In the UK, the IPA and ISBA principles say agencies and advertisers should be open with each other about AI, and neither should put AI-generated content in materials for the other without agreement. Settle it at kickoff, along with ownership, usage and likeness.

Which tools do creative directors use?

Chat assistants and image models for sketching, node canvases such as Figma Weave, Flora and ComfyUI for repeatable pipelines, and brief-in tools that plan and render a set. See node-based AI workflows.

How many options should a creative director review per shot?

Plan for about eight renders per kept photo, from our agency’s 2026 count across four campaigns, and more when one person must look the same across several scenes or when something is in motion. Review them in one sitting per shot, side by side, so the comparison is fair.

How creative directors use AI in 2026

Checked September 24, 20267 min read

Short answer

Creative directors use AI to sketch ideas and routes, to show a client the light and casting before a shoot is booked, and to make the versions a campaign needs across sizes and markets. Ideation is the most common use. Forrester found 58% of US agency executives use generative AI for it, against 30% for images or video. The idea and the final call stay with people, and more of the job becomes briefing and choosing.

Where AI sits in the job

Forrester figures reported by The Drum in September 2026 put ideation and brainstorming first among US agency executives’ uses of generative AI (58%), ahead of image or video development (30%) and copy (29%). Coca-Cola, which has made AI holiday films two years running, describes the same split. Its head of generative AI says creative direction "has and always will be human-led", with AI doing execution and production.

Part of the job	What AI does well now	What stays with people
The idea	Lists of angles and references to react to	Choosing the problem and the idea that solves it
Routes	Several looks for one idea in an afternoon: light, palette, casting, setting	Choosing the two or three routes worth a client’s time
Pre-visualization	Frames close to the final look, before a shoot is booked	Deciding what the frames promise, and saying so
Production of stills	Product, lifestyle and on-model photos from reference photos	Art direction, casting approval, and checking every frame against the product
Versions	New sizes, backgrounds, seasons and markets from an approved frame	Keeping the product and the brand identical across all of them
Sign-off	A first check of each frame against its references	The final yes, the claims check and the rights check

The six beats of a job, and where AI helps

Beat	What happens	Where AI helps	What to watch
1. Brief in	The client brief becomes a creative brief	Reading the brand’s site and past imagery, drafting questions back to the client	The brief still needs one sentence a person wrote about what the work must do
2. Routes	Two or three directions are developed	Sketching many looks per route, then narrowing	Routes that look different but say the same thing
3. CD markup	The creative director marks up frames	Remaking one frame from a specific note, with two to four versions side by side	Notes like "make it pop" that a model cannot act on
4. Client presentation	Routes go to the client	Frames that show the light, casting and setting	Concepts read as finals
5. Round two	Feedback is applied	Reworking single frames without redoing the set	Drift: each fix changes something else
6. Delivery	Finals go out in every size	Resizes, extensions and versions from approved frames	Product accuracy and file specs in every version

Beats 3 to 5 are where the craft moves. A model acts on precise words, so markup becomes written direction: light, lens, palette, framing. See how to art direct AI images and how to present AI concepts to a client.

What changes in the role

The hours that went into waiting on production go into briefing and choosing, and the choosing is real work. In four campaigns our agency made in 2026, 361 renders gave 45 photos an art director kept, about 8 per photo. Kalshi’s 2025 NBA Finals ad took 300 to 400 generations for 15 usable clips, according to its maker. Silverside AI says Coca-Cola’s 2024 holiday film involved rendering 10,000 frames.

Research on AI-assisted art points the same way. A study of more than 4 million artworks by over 50,000 users found that artists using text-to-image AI made about 25% more work, and their work drew more favorites per view. The authors linked the gains to artists who explored new ideas and filtered the model’s output well. See how many renders per usable photo for budgeting the review time.

What brands and agencies have done

Brand and date	Made by	What AI did	What happened
Coca-Cola, November 2024	Secret Level, Silverside AI and Wild Card, using four generative AI models	A full AI remake of "Holidays Are Coming"	Silverside says the job took two months instead of over 12. Critics online called it "soulless" (NBC News).
Coca-Cola, November 2025	Secret Level and Silverside AI	Two new AI takes on the same campaign	Coca-Cola says AI lets its teams make versions of a film for different audiences and countries.
Toys"R"Us, June 2024	Native Foreign	A brand film made almost entirely with OpenAI’s Sora, plus corrective VFX	Hundreds of iterative shots cut to a couple dozen, in a few weeks.
Kalshi, June 2025	PJ Accetturo	An NBA Finals ad made with Google’s Veo 3	About $2,000 and two days of work, by the maker’s account (Business Insider).
Unilever, March 2025	With NVIDIA Omniverse and Collective World	Product "digital twins", 3D models that render product imagery	Unilever says its product imagery now comes out two times faster and 50% cheaper.
Mondelez, October 2025	Built with Publicis and Accenture	An in-house tool for marketing content, including product pages	Mondelez expects 30% to 50% lower production costs, with people checking what the tool makes (Reuters).
H&M, 2025	In house	Digital twins of 30 real models	The models keep the right to use their twins. First images in July 2025.
McDonald’s Netherlands, December 2025	TBWA\Neboko and The Sweetshop	An AI-made Christmas ad	Removed four days after release, following a backlash (NBC News).

Each row is from the brand, its maker, or a named news report; see the sources below.

The risks, and what to do about each

Risk	The evidence	What to do
Sameness	In a 2024 Science Advances study of 293 writers, stories written with AI ideas were rated more creative one by one but were more similar to each other. The 4-million-artwork study found average novelty fell.	Keep the idea human, work from the brand’s own visual DNA and references, and kill routes that look like the model’s default.
Product accuracy	In June 2026, REI withdrew from a Meta AI personalization tool after it turned a vendor image into a bicycle with two sets of handlebars (The Drum).	Check every frame against the real product before it runs: the QA checklist.
Rights	The US Copyright Office (January 2025) says AI output is protected only where a human determined enough of its expressive elements, and that prompts alone do not give enough control.	Keep a record of human selection, arrangement and edits. See who owns AI-generated images.
Client trust	The IPA and ISBA principles (UK, 2023) say agencies and advertisers should not put AI-generated content in materials for each other without agreement.	Agree AI use in writing and label every frame. See telling clients and customers you used AI.
Backlash	McDonald’s Netherlands pulled its ad within four days. Critics called Coca-Cola’s 2024 film "soulless", and the brand made another in 2025.	Know where your audience stands, and decide which work must stay photographed.

Rules some brands have written down

L’Oréal (May 2024): no AI-generated life-like images of the face, body, hair or skin to support or enhance product benefits in external communication.
Mondelez (October 2025): people check what its AI tool produces, and its guidelines bar depictions of unhealthy eating and offensive stereotypes.
H&M (2025): the real models behind its digital twins hold the right to use them.

Write your own before the first job: which kinds of shots may be AI, which must be photographed, who approves likeness, what gets disclosed, and which records you keep. The claims rule matters most for beauty, food and supplements, where an image can make a promise the product does not keep.

Questions people also ask

Do clients have to agree before an agency uses AI?: In the UK, the IPA and ISBA principles say agencies and advertisers should be open with each other about AI, and neither should put AI-generated content in materials for the other without agreement. Settle it at kickoff, along with ownership, usage and likeness.
Which tools do creative directors use?: Chat assistants and image models for sketching, node canvases such as Figma Weave, Flora and ComfyUI for repeatable pipelines, and brief-in tools that plan and render a set. See node-based AI workflows.
How many options should a creative director review per shot?: Plan for about eight renders per kept photo, from our agency’s 2026 count across four campaigns, and more when one person must look the same across several scenes or when something is in motion. Review them in one sitting per shot, side by side, so the comparison is fair.

Where Overs fits

Overs covers the production part of this job for still photos: research, brand rules, art direction, casting, shot planning and prompts, with a quality check before each render. It shows the shot plan and an estimated cost before any photo is made, and approvals and rejections become brand memory for later photos. It does not make video or publish to channels.

Free for 40 photos a month. The AI that makes the photos is billed separately, on your own key, with no markup from Overs.

Start free How it works

Sources

Checked on September 24, 2026. Prices, specs and rules change; follow the links for the current versions.