Mid-tier brands scale AI creative production as costs fall and tools mature

A cohort of mid-market advertisers — including hospitality chain Wyndham Hotels & Resorts, consumer healthcare company Opella and betting brand BetMGM — has begun building in-house creative teams that use artificial intelligence tools to produce digital marketing assets at scale, according to a report published by Digiday on October 2, 2026.

The moves signal that scaled AI creative production, once largely confined to industry giants such as Unilever, Coca-Cola and L'Oréal, is becoming more common among what Digiday describes as marketing's "upper middle tier" of advertisers.

Wyndham: 15x asset output, 75% time savings

Wyndham, whose overall marketing and loyalty budget came to $565 million in its last full financial year, has worked with AI firm Adora for approximately one year to generate still images and video for its paid and owned Instagram activity. A five-person in-house team uses the platform to create multiple asset versions based on real photography of the hotel estate and tracks performance via media mix modelling and Meta's platform API.

Mike Shiwdin, gvp of loyalty, guest engagement and strategic partnerships at Wyndham, told Digiday the approach had allowed the team to generate 15 times the previous asset volume while cutting production and approval time by 75%. Shiwdin also said the company had recorded a significant rise in customer engagement, telling Digiday: "We've seen a six times improvement in site visit rate over our benchmark." He did not provide financial specifics.

Adora CEO Marco Matos attributed the performance gains to iterative creative learning: "Over time you'll see performance go up becuase we're figuring out what are the best performing creatives, and honing in on those."

Wyndham's agency of record remains Havas, which handles larger-scale, more traditional creative briefs.

Opella: 20,000 pieces of content and growing

Opella, spun out of Sanofi in 2025, operates an 85-strong team using generative AI tools to write strategy briefs and produce and animate marketing assets, including brand mascots. Julien Leterrier, global head of martech at Opella, told Digiday the company is now producing "20 times" the creative volume it did before adopting the tools, primarily through variants adapted for different languages and markets. "We've produced more than 20,000 pieces of content. We could not reach that scale before," he said.

Leterrier added that Opella has implemented rules prohibiting the depiction of medical professionals in AI-generated assets and appends AI disclosures to campaign materials in markets that require them, such as the European Union, noting: "No fake doctors."

BetMGM: Regulated category prompts selective rollout

BetMGM, which spends approximately $160 million on media annually and employs an in-house creative department of 120 people, has adopted AI tools including Arcana AI for imagery and video, but retains human staff for certain production tasks given the regulated nature of sports betting. Victor Gonzalez, senior director of creative at BetMGM, said the company had held back from using AI to generate assets carrying betting odds information.

"You can't hold AI accountable," Gonzalez said, adding that while BetMGM "Isn't 100% there yet," its position may evolve as the tools prove more reliable.

Falling costs and improved tools accelerate adoption

Digiday reported that the upfront investment required to build AI creative systems has declined as compute costs have dropped. According to the article, the price American businesses pay per million tokens fell 41% from its peak in March of this year, even as overall AI spending has risen.

Several large advertisers are using Brandtech Group's Pencil platform as a foundation for their AI creative operations. Pencil CEO Will Hanschell told Digiday that while the company counts clients with more than $10 billion in revenue, its fastest-growing client segment comprises businesses with less than $1 billion in annual income. "They culturally move faster," Hanschell said. "They've experimented faster… they're looking for something bespoke, but less rigid than a traditional enterprise solution."

Octavio Maron, chief creative partner of creative innovation at Dentsu, said improving tool reliability is widening the addressable market: "It's become simpler for a broader range of clients to see the possibilities of how [AI] can be applied to their brands."

Pre-flight creative testing rises alongside AI production

As AI accelerates asset production, more brands are testing creative before release. Kantar reported a 17% rise in early-stage creative tests between December 2025 and July of this year, a trend that Kristi Rogers, president for global solutions & product at Kantar, attributed directly to greater AI creative adoption. "New qualitative and quantitative approaches are helping advertisers to identify the strongest creative routes before AI workflows take over, production begins and budget is committed," Rogers said.

A Dentsu survey cited by Digiday found that four out of five CMOs — 81% — expect they will need to produce "significantly more content" in the near future, a dynamic that is accelerating competitive pressure to adopt AI production capabilities.