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Autumn is usually the time to set the budget for the coming year. There is one trend, however, that should not be overlooked. Production costs in marketing have been falling for years, and AI is accelerating this development exponentially.

Let’s take a quick look at the main milestones in this trend.

In 2022, the costs of creating text, from translations to copywriting, dropped significantly. As an example, in 2020, translating a global event into eight languages still cost a global company several thousand euros, even with tools like Google Translate. With the rise of LLMs in 2022, this expense dropped to a monthly subscription of under 100 euros, plus a human review, if needed. Market studies report growing price pressure on translation agencies, and some even noted a market decline of up to 4%.
Freelance platforms reported a similar, clear drop in copywriting jobs and increasing price competition at the end of 2022.

This trend continues to accelerate as AI tools become more widespread. The American Marketing Association reported at the end of 2024 that 70% of marketers use tools like ChatGPT at least once a week. However, usage is still mostly focused on text: in the U.S., text creation tops the list of usage scenarios.

Image

In 2024, AI-driven image generation reached a new level of quality that had a noticeable impact on large budgets. One example is the global fintech company Klarna. Following the introduction of AI for campaign and image creation, the company reported savings of around 10 million US dollars in marketing for 2024. With tools such as Midjourney, DALL·E, and Firefly, Klarna reduced its budgets by 11% while increasing the number of campaigns.

This trend, much like text creation, is continuing to accelerate. The days when you had to count the number of fingers on a hand in an AI-generated image seem to be over. Text within images still poses challenges, when there are too many details (see Newsstand example), but large elements are now rendered correctly most of the time.

Video

The year 2025 is all about video creation.

Do you remember Apple’s famous 1984 commercial? Producing that epic ad cost around 500,000 US dollars and involved more than 200 “extras”. About thirty years later, the cost structure for a global brand’s commercial looked like this:

• Creative fee (concept and storyline): €5,000
• Project management: €3,500
• Video production (studio, editing, grading, animation, graphic design, sound etc.): €9,000
• Usage rights (stock music, footage, and narration): €10,500

For that amount, you could produce a solid commercial ready for an international audience.

Today, however, it is possible to recreate the look and feel of some of the most iconic ads, from Old Spice’s “Hello Ladies” to Nike’s “Find Your Greatness,” in just seconds, for a monthly subscription cost of under 200 US dollars (see example). With a few additional hours spent fixing some AI errors, you can get a ready-to-use commercial.

Conclusion

As a result of these trends, from text to video, there is now an overabundance of content. This is evident in the growing difficulty social platforms have in filtering relevant material. Take YouTube, for example. The platform is trying to address the issue by adjusting its monetization rules to “better identify mass-produced and repetitive content”.

Another example is LinkedIn, where the algorithm increasingly favors posts from individual people instead of company pages, due to the flood of corporate content. Today, it is much harder to grow a company page than it was five years ago. Businesses have responded: we can see a surge in content posted by employees and the C-level. Posting a professional portrait picture that is not topic-specific and writing about a business topic that has the potential to trigger emotions has become a new formula for success on LinkedIn. Partly because it is now much easier to create such pictures with AI. You simply upload an original photo of yourself and generate countless variations.

All these developments are shifting focus toward the other major part of the annual budget: media. When everyone can produce acceptable content at low cost, organic channels become overcrowded. To stand out, brands need to invest more in paid media, which is becoming more expensive as a result. The advantage is that production savings can be redirected toward media spending.

The irony is that technological development is actually leading to the return of earlier strategies.