AI in advertising enters its next phase with new talent-led production venture

For Marie-Celine Merret and Vinne Schifferstein, the problem with how the industry is talking about creative AI isn’t that there’s too much experimentation. It’s that too many people still think it’s easy.

“There’s this misconception that AI is easy,” Schifferstein said. “Agencies think, okay, I’ll just hire one person who knows a bit about AI and that’s sorted. And then they figure out that person can’t actually do what we want to do, and it still looks shit.”

After helping establish Monks in Australia and New Zealand, and later building high-end creative AI production capability MADE THIS inside Clemenger, the pair have now launched MC&V AI Creative Production - an independent, AI-native production company designed for what they describe as the real constraints of modern advertising: speed, craft, specialisation and constant change.

“This is not about tools. This is about talent and culture,” Schifferstein said.

Merret said creative AI has only recently reached a point where it can reliably support high-end production work.

“Only in the last four to six months have we gotten to a production level, great quality for a lot of things, plus workflows, plus more artists really diving deeper into the tools,” she said. “We look back at projects we did six months ago and go, wow, that’s already old.”

That pace of change, they argue, is exactly why traditional agency structures struggle.

“You need to be nimble and flexible and change your way of working really fast to keep up with these new methods,” Schifferstein said. “If you’re stuck in your ways and stuck in silos, it’s very, very difficult to adopt all this.”

MC&V was born out of that tension. Inside large holding groups, both founders saw growing focus on building proprietary platforms and technology stacks. But in creative AI, they believe that logic breaks down.

“The tool they’re having conversations with now, by the time it goes through procurement and gets on the roster, six months later it’s not the best tool anymore,” Schifferstein said.

“Tech is not a differentiator anymore,” Merret added. “Everyone is using the same foundation. It’s really the talent that becomes the differentiator.”

AI production is already hyper-specialised

Rather than one “AI person” per agency, MC&V operates more like a global guild of specialists.

“If we do a production, we’ve got people specialised in wardrobe. And within wardrobe, if you need knitwear, we have a person who only does knitwear,” Schifferstein said.

“Same with skin texture, tone, lighting. They’re specialists who do that 24/7. It’s not one person doing it all.”

Most of that talent doesn’t want traditional employment.

“Every job needs different talent,” he said. “And most of that talent doesn’t want to be employed.”

MC&V’s model is therefore fluid by design: assemble the right team for the brief, design the workflow first, then decide where AI genuinely adds value - and where it doesn’t.

“There are still moments where we go, this is not good for AI. We should do a shoot for this,” Merret said.

“Just AI for AI’s sake is not it. It has to be relevant to the brand, the brief and the ethos of the business.”

Why independence matters

The move from a network-backed model to an independent venture was not about rejecting agencies, they say, but about working alongside them.

“From a go-to-market perspective, we do business with agencies,” Schifferstein said. “We’re not competing against them.”

Merret added: “We don’t see ourselves as an agency. We’ve always thrived in the production world.”

They argue agencies are sitting on strong ideas that increasingly struggle to get made under traditional production economics.

“They’re all sitting on these beautiful desk-drawer ideas they know they struggle to afford,” Merret said. “Now we’re here to help bring those to life at the level of craft agencies expect.”

A scalable, global play

Although MC&V is launching from Australia, demand is already global.

“We thought we’d just do Australia,” Schifferstein said. “But we got so much traction globally it’s insane.”

For the founders, the shift they’re betting on is bigger than any single company.

“This is the next era of how content is made,” Merret said. “It’s not going away. Even if you keep doing traditional shoots, this will be part of how creativity is brought into the world.”