Making Animated Ads Used to Be Impossible for Small Teams
A year ago, creating an animated commercial meant:
A studio
Illustrators
Animators
Voice actors
Weeks of production
A massive budget
Today?
You can create high-quality animated ads with AI, and for the first time, they’re starting to actually look good.
Not “AI slop.”
Not uncanny demos.
Real creative work you can charge for.
So I tested something.
The Experiment: Can AI Turn a Cheap Product Into a Premium Ad?
Last week I went to the dollar store, grabbed a random product, and set a challenge: “Let’s turn this into a high-budget animated ad I could realistically charge premium money for.”
This was the product we chose.
The product was a nostalgic bubble bath soap I remembered from childhood.
Perfect choice, it already had a small mascot on the label.
Which meant something important:
We already had our main character.
Step 1: Turning a Product Label Into a Character
I cropped the mascot from the packaging and uploaded it into Google’s NanoBanana.
With a simple prompt, NanoBanana extracted the mascot and helped me create a clean character sheet.
From there, that character became reusable:
Different poses
Different environments
Different styles
This works for almost any product - mascots, logos, even abstract brand symbols.
Step 3: Generating Scenes Frame by Frame
Using NanoBanana, I placed our mascot into environments that matched the story:
A warm, playful lab
A colorful bubble world
Transitional fantasy scenes
Each prompt built on the last.
This is the key shift:
You don’t generate everything at once.
You direct the story forward, frame by frame.
Step 4: Turning Images Into Video
Once the scenes were ready, it was time to animate them.
There are a lot of AI video tools out there, but to simplify:
Veo → best quality right now
Kling → strong and more affordable
I tested both.
The important part isn’t the tool, it’s learning to think like an AI director:
How should the scene move?
Where should the camera go?
How does one shot transition to the next?
Kling’s start-to-end frame control made this easier, especially for smooth transitions.
Step 5: Voiceover, CTA, and Final Assembly
Once the video scenes were done:
I organized everything into folders
Generated voiceover using ElevenLabs
Matched the tone to the story
Edited lightly in Premiere or CapCut
The final scene always featured the product, because good ads end with a clear CTA.
The Big Shift: What This Really Means
What used to require:
A full creative team
Weeks of work
Tens of thousands of dollars
Now requires:
An idea
Creative direction
A system
That’s the real advantage.
If you’re a creator, marketer, or business owner, this opens a new lane:
You can create premium-looking animated ads, and charge accordingly.
What I’m Building Next
I’m documenting these workflows — not theory, real systems; inside my free guide.
It covers:
Tools
Creative thinking
AI workflows like this one
You can grab it by subscribing to the newsletter below.
This is where creative work is heading.