Luke Scott fears AI-made adverts will cost Britain a generation of directors trained on commercials

Advertising's AI push sets a saving clients can book this year against a training route whose loss would show only after a decade or more. The incentive sits with the client. According to one industry source quoted by the Guardian, some clients are taking up AI-led ads to "show finance directors they are making savings" ^[15]. The benefit of the old arrangement went to someone else. Top Gun's producers, Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, picked Tony Scott to direct after seeing a TV ad in which he showed a Saab racing a fighter jet ^[13]. Guy Ritchie started out in music videos and commercials, and Paddington in Peru director Dougal Wilson made John Lewis Christmas ads ^[5].

In my view, British film and television have for decades had directors trained on advertising budgets. Ridley Scott told a Bafta audience that commercials had been his "film school" ^[4]. The cost WPP is now targeting is the work that did the training. Cindy Rose, WPP's chief executive, said the group no longer needs to spend clients' budgets on expensive shoots abroad because the work can be done in the studio, and that this would completely change the economics of its content supply chain ^[12]. Luke Scott, who runs the group that includes Ridley Scott Associates, described what a shoot teaches. "The creative business is something you learn by doing. It is in the doing that is most valuable," he said ^[7][8].

WPP's answer is volume. "All clients need a vastly greater amount of content," said Richard Glasson, chief executive of WPP Production, who argued that the industry has always adopted new technology and AI is no different ^[1][2]. A skeptic of the lost-generation case would take him at his word: more content should mean more work for people starting out. The difficulty is the kind of work. The same industry source said AI-led output often looks "cookie cutter" and suffers a creative "erosion from the diminished role of a director" ^[14]. Glasson's own pitch describes a job unlike a location shoot. "We can place a brand anywhere in the world in a single afternoon," he said ^[3].

So far the evidence for a lost generation is testimony. The Guardian ties the race to two motives, cutting client costs and avoiding being pushed aside by big tech ^[6]. Its report rests on Luke Scott's fears, an unnamed source's estimate that some ads cost up to 60% less to make, and WPP's own statements ^[7][15]. It does not include figures on lost commissions or on how many early-career directors are getting less work. The link between cheaper ads and fewer trained directors is an inference from how the Scotts and Ritchie came up ^[4][5][13].

Sequencing is where the decision sits for anyone signing off production budgets. WPP's east London facility, opened last month in a converted warehouse, is the first site in an international rollout of a £600m business ^[10]. Rose has called the period a "golden age of marketing" ^[11]. A client that moves a shoot into that studio this quarter takes one location commission out of the pool from which producers have hired directors, as Simpson and Bruckheimer did ^[13]. Luke Scott described the risk as sameness. "The grave danger is the monoculturalisation of everything," he said ^[9].