Last month a 30-foot sign showed up on a hillside above the 101 in LA. White letters, designed to look like the Hollywood sign. Drivers were slowing down to film it, local TV ran segments, even caused a fender bender. Nobody knew what it was for at first.
Turned out it was a Fiverr stunt. The sign spelled the name of an AI video director called Billy Boman - Stockholm-based, works alone, has made brand videos for Google, Universal Music, Klarna. Fiverr was launching a hub where brands hire solo AI directors instead of traditional agencies, and Boman was the face of it.
Their CMO was pretty direct when Hollywood Reporter covered it - said the traditional model is breaking and the work coming out of the hub stands next to traditional studio output, faster and cheaper. That's a CMO of a public company calling the production model obsolete, which felt like a moment worth paying attention to.
A few numbers I came across, take with salt: AI video search reportedly grew 66% in just the back half of 2025. UGC creator rates apparently dropped 44% year over year. The Dor Brothers, also on the hub, made an AI film for Snoop Dogg that hit 20 million views in 48 hours with no production crew.
The reason this works now is the tooling has caught up. I've been messing around with stuff like Higgsfield, Runway, Kling - one person can now run a pipeline that used to need a 20-person team. Multi-shot consistency, character continuity, all of that basically got solved in the last year.
Anyone here noticing the same shift in their own industry?