06 — Business impact

What changes, and what a pilot should actually measure

No vendor can tell you what your cost per approved asset will be. What can be described precisely is where the money moves — and which six numbers a three-week pilot should produce.

The four shifts

Value shows up in the middle of the process, not at the end

Faster iteration

The first cut arrives in hours, which moves the argument earlier, where changes are still cheap. Most of the saving is in the number of rounds, not in the cost of the first render.

More variants per idea

Ten hooks, three openings, four markets from one master. Variant cost approaches zero, so testing becomes possible where it used to be a budget line.

Better reuse of owned assets

The render pack, the turnaround, the interior detail set — assets a brand already paid for keep producing new frames instead of being re-shot per campaign.

Scale without headcount

Regional and dealer-level volume stops being a staffing question. The constraint becomes review capacity, which is a manageable problem.

Case evidence

One film, five working days, a four-figure generation budget

The automotive mood film in this programme (title 17) was delivered in roughly five working days from a 25-second brief, with generation cost in the region of RMB 1,000 — around EUR 130 at the time.

This is a production record from one internal project. It is not a client benchmark, not a tender figure, and it excludes the cost of the reference pack, human review and the continuity repair. We state it because it is true, and we label it because it would be dishonest to present it as a market rate.

Where the cost moves to

Reference preparation — a new craft step, and the one that most affects quality
Review — more assets to approve, so review capacity becomes the bottleneck
Rights and likeness clearance — unchanged, and in Europe usually the critical path
Continuity repair — predictable, budgetable, and cheaper than re-shooting

Pilot scorecard

Six numbers to produce before anyone signs a framework

Measure these on your own assets, in your own approval process, against a brief you have already delivered once. Anything less is a demo.

Metric	How it is measured	Why it decides the business case
First-cut turnaround	Brief to first approvable cut, in working days	Decides whether campaigns can be planned around generative work at all
Rounds per approved asset	Review cycles logged before sign-off	The real cost driver; a cheap render with eight rounds is expensive
Cost per approved variant	Generation plus preparation plus review, per market and format	The only per-unit figure procurement will accept
Continuity notes per round	Brand-critical corrections raised by reviewers	Forecasts the human pass a production plan must budget for
Markets per master	Locales delivered from one approved master	Where European programmes win or lose their business case
Rights clearance time	Days from asset selection to documented consent	In Europe this is frequently the true critical path

Why no percentages. Published efficiency claims in this category are usually measured on cherry-picked briefs, without review load, and against a baseline nobody can audit. A pilot that produces these six numbers is worth more than any benchmark on a slide — and it survives a procurement review.

Start here

Three ways to go deeper, none of them a sales call

If you have ten minutes, take the evidence register. If you have a campaign, take the pilot scope.

Explore the demonstrations

Seventeen titles, each labelled with provenance, input and the capability it demonstrates.

Open the showcase ↗

Discuss a use case

Bring a real brief — a launch, a localisation wave, a stack of end-cards — and we will cost it honestly.

Enterprise contact ↗

Request a PoC

Three weeks, a defined reference pack, and a scoring rubric agreed before the first generation.

Scope a pilot ↗