Nano Banana, VEO 3 and the AI engines changing the game for e-commerce brands

Chanel No. 5 spent $33 million on their iconic 2004 campaign starring Nicole Kidman. Guinness poured an estimated $13 million into their “Tipping Point” commercial in 2007, while Apple shelled out an eye-watering $137 million for the “Think Different” campaign in 1997 — a personal favorite.

For Mad Men fans, it’s easy to feel nostalgic for a time when colleagues gathered in smoky boardrooms, whiskey in hand, dreaming up campaigns that could change the world. From masterminds on Madison Avenue to billboards lighting up Times Square and Piccadilly Circus, we like to think that era had a certain magic, thanks to John Hamm.

However, earlier this week, I read an article in the Financial Times by Jemima Kelly titled “AI is Killing the Magic.” She writes: “What utilitarian tech bros like Altman don’t seem to get is that creativity is not just about the final output — the act of being creative is itself, in many ways, the point.” While Kelly is right in more ways than one, the reality is that today’s e-commerce brands are slowly being handed the keys to a creative kingdom that was once reserved for a privileged few. And while I agree that a Picasso might lose some of its magic if it were generated on Nano Banana, the truth is that AI is empowering brands to create content that’s fresh, exciting, and, perhaps, marking the start of a whole new marketing revolution.

Our journey to the ‘Great Creative Reset’

You might want to check back with me in 25 years on this one, but here’s what we can expect to see over the next couple of decades.

2023 – AI Joins the Marketing Department
Brands start using AI to write copy, generate product shots, and storyboard ads. Most results look like fever dreams, smiling people with 12 fingers and “inspirational” slogans like Feel the socks of tomorrow. Still, it’s cheaper than a photo shoot in Shoreditch.

2024 – The Great Prompt Rush
Every marketer becomes a “prompt engineer.” Job titles like Creative Strategist quietly evolve into AI Whisperer. Slack channels fill with screenshots of Midjourney generations captioned “This one actually kinda slaps.”

2025 – The Content Conveyor Belt
AI platforms now handle campaign planning, visual generation, and copywriting. Teams upload a moodboard, select “brand tone,” and watch the assets appear. Interns are rebranded as “human oversight specialists.”

2026 – The Personalization Pandemic
Creative assets become hyper-tailored. Each user sees their own version of a campaign, their name, their city, their weather. The line between “targeted” and “creepy” officially disappears.

2028 – Shoot Days Become Prompt Days
Brands shut down studios. “Creative production” now happens on screens. Instead of booking photographers, marketers book GPUs. Someone jokes that Adobe now stands for Artificial Design Operations by Everyone.

2030 – The Brand Brain Era
Each brand trains its own AI creative engine, a bespoke model that knows tone, style, audience, and historical data. It writes taglines, generates visuals, tests variations, and even critiques its own work. Humans mostly nod approvingly.

2033 – 24/7 Campaigns
Campaigns never end; they evolve. AI constantly A/B tests, re-optimizes, and updates assets based on performance. “Launch day” becomes meaningless; “creative refresh” becomes extinct.

2035 – The AI CMO
Brands appoint AI as their Chief Marketing Officer. It allocates budgets, buys media, and negotiates influencer deals with other AIs. Humans handle “culture alignment,” i.e., making sure it doesn’t accidentally sponsor fascists.

2038 – The Synthetic Studio
AI can now generate entire cinematic commercials in real time, photorealistic actors, perfect lighting, zero reshoots. “Post-production” is instant. The word “render” is used only by nostalgic boomers.

2040 – The Self-Aware Brand
Each brand’s AI develops its own creative personality. Nike’s AI starts making emotional short films. IKEA’s AI launches a furniture sitcom. Liquid Death’s AI gets banned from Twitter (again).

2045 – The Autonomous Ecosystem
AI doesn’t just make content; it strategizes, distributes, and monetizes it. It predicts cultural trends weeks before they happen and adjusts tone accordingly. Brands begin referring to themselves as “living systems.”

2050 – The Great Creative Reset
Having automated everything, humanity gets bored. A counterculture movement emerges: handmade creativity. People start paying premiums for human-made ads, typos included. The best-performing campaign of the year? A billboard scrawled with a marker pen that simply says, “Made by a real person.”

What’s next — Building an AI Architecture for content development

AI is still far from perfect when it comes to image generation. After spending the past few weeks experimenting with Google’s Nano Banana and stitching videos together with Veo through Google Flow, I can confirm it gets you most of the way there. After speaking with the design team, it’s clear there’s still a layer of Photoshop polish required to refine the small details that AI’s randomness tends to miss during rendering.

That said, for smaller e-commerce brands, it represents a huge leap forward. AI now enables them to build a strong foundation of creative assets at scale. But to truly save time, brands need to establish their creative development architecture first. Tools like Weavy AI are starting to connect everything, from GPT’s intelligence layer (which hosts your brand knowledge and creative logic) to prompt templates and final design outputs.

If I were running a brand today, my focus would be on empowering designers with a clear, efficient workflow, one that enables them to produce high-quality, data-informed creative content quickly, learning and improving from ad performance along the way. Forget hiring UGC agencies, and start implementing an AI framework.