Indian brands are commissioning their own microdrama series as Higgsfield sells one click AI drama ads

CAA and Ogilvy launch ECHO, letting brands make AI ads from licensed celebrity scans

Ogilvy's ECHO builds ads from scans kept in The CAA Vault, and the star must approve every asset before release. Terry Crews is the only reported talent so far, no brands are named, and the cost savings are the companies' own estimates.

Terry Crews has opted in to appearing in ads he never filmed, and he has to approve every one of them. When so much of what we scroll past can't be traced back to a real person, this system answers with a label on the ad itself: "[Talent Name] Approved | Recreated with AI."

Ogilvy launched the platform, ECHO, on Monday with CAA, under a new partnership between the talent agency and Ogilvy's parent company WPP. It draws on The CAA Vault, a scanning studio built for CAA by Veritone that records a client's face, voice, expressions and walk with 204 cameras. A brand starts from one real shoot, and ECHO turns it into local versions and cuts for each platform. Ogilvy says a shoot that yields 8 to 10 assets becomes roughly 30 to 50, at 65% to 75% less per asset.

The guardrails are the pitch. Automated checks compare every asset against the star's usage terms, written into the contract in a form software can read, and nothing is released until the agent and the talent sign off in an approval portal. Talent choose which brands and markets they appear in. Carol Reed, Ogilvy's chief innovation officer, calls it the "NIL moment" between advertising and entertainment, borrowing the name, image and likeness deals of US college sports.

Most of the roster is still unknown. Crews is the only star reported so far, no brands have been named, and Reed says the first pilots should go live toward the end of the year, starting with social ads. Audiences may be the harder sell: YouGov found 49% of Britons view AI-generated actors in ads negatively.

Our take: the label proves the star said yes, not that the star was there. That is an honest line to draw, and it is the line audiences will judge these ads by.

Source: Ogilvy, Nov 9, 2026; Digiday; The Hollywood Reporter.

Sky's Christmas ad used real dancers, then Framestore erased them with AI

Framestore used AI alongside hand compositing to remove the dancers from Sky's 60 second Christmas ad, and to plan shots and add detail to the sets. Neither company has named the tools or said which final shots carry AI work.

Every costume dancing through Sky's Christmas ad had a real dancer inside it, until Framestore took them out. The dancing is human, the missing dancers are where AI did its work, and neither company has said which tools did it.

"That's Christmas Sorted" is a 60-second spot directed by Dave Meyers at RadicalMedia, choreographed by Shay Latukolan and set to Groovejet. It launched on November 6 as Sky's biggest Christmas campaign yet, with outfits from Wicked, Friends, Bridgerton, Game of Thrones and Premier League kits dancing through a snowy costume warehouse.

Framestore says AI sat inside its normal VFX process from start to finish. Before the shoot, it paired traditional previs (rough early versions of each shot) with AI tools to test camera moves, timing and lenses from Meyers' storyboards. Its artists built the warehouse sets in 3D, then used digital matte painting and AI tools to add detail, texture and light. To make the costumes look self-animating, it combined classic compositing with AI to remove the dancers, and hand-animated some costumes in CG.

Sky's executive creative director Robin Garton drew the line plainly: "While all the dancing was with real talent, the creation of the world they inhabit made use of pioneering AI production techniques." Framestore's credits name an AI supervisor, Aitor Echeveste, and a head of AI, Alex Villabon, beside its 2D, CG and animation leads.

That is a different bet from the Christmas ads that sold AI as the product. Coca-Cola's AI holiday spots drew backlash in 2024 and again in 2025, and McDonald's Netherlands pulled its AI Christmas ad last December, three days after it went up.

Our take: Sky kept every dance human and gave AI the invisible jobs, and naming an AI supervisor in the credits is more honest than an ad sold as AI made. What is still missing is which final shots AI touched, and with what tools.

Source: Sky Group, Nov 6, 2026; Framestore via AWN and TVBEurope, Nov 9, 2026.