Artificial intelligence has upended the advertising industry, pressuring agencies and production companies to cut prices, restructure operations and slash jobs. But a surprising winner has emerged amid the drive for AI efficiency: studios that specialize in the laborious work of handcrafting ads.
Backlash against AI imagery everywhere from major ad campaigns to local shawarma stands is driving demand for high-touch techniques like claymation and hand-drawn animation, filmmakers say.
The boom includes two new holiday campaigns on Monday alone: an e.l.f. Beauty commercial starring puppets wearing real makeup, and a Levi's stop-motion spot inspired by horror movies and the brand's 1995 "Clayman" ad.
Apple, which apologized in 2024 after being lambasted online for an ad depicting a machine crushing artistic tools, this year also has employed glasswork and practical effects to forge a new Apple TV logo, stop-motion to promote its Games product, embroidery to tease its Home Collection and fluid dynamics to create a new visual identity for Apple Music.
"The whole last year, we've been nonstop booked," said Shel Rasch, co-founder of Oregon-based stop-motion studio Stunt Puppet Pictures.
The company has gone from saying yes to almost every commercial brief in the past five years to turning down work, according to Rasch and her co-founder and husband, Justin Rasch, who recently worked on a claymation ad for Apple's Mac Mini alongside London-based animation studio Blinkink.
Blinkink similarly has seen a boost to its handcrafted advertising business, according to founder and executive producer Bart Yates. Commercials and, to a lesser extent, music videos, are "definitely keeping the lights on at the moment" at the company while financing for long-form projects takes a dip, he added.
Cami Kwan, director of Burbank, Calif.-based stop-motion studio Apartment D Films, which animated the e.l.f. spot, estimates that inbound inquiries have doubled over the past two years.
E.l.f.'s campaign wasn't devised as a reaction to AI, but the brand was seeking something visually unique at a time of abundant AI imagery, said Chief Marketing Officer Oshiya Savur.
"The guiding principle was to get to this sense of nostalgia and the analog world," Savur said. "We just wanted to make you feel something."
The investment in craft builds on some brands' "no AI" disclaimers in ads. Despite the proliferation of chatbots and assistants, Americans at large have grown more skeptical of AI over the past year, with the percentage of those who believe technology does more harm than good increasing to 39% in 2026 from 31% in 2025, according to a poll from Gallup and Bentley University.
Humans are innately wired to value effort, said Greg Hahn, the co-founder and chief creative officer of advertising agency Mischief. When it comes to stop-motion in particular, consumers "realize how painstaking it is, how every frame has to be individually thought out," Hahn said. "And that's become really valuable in a world where you can prompt two sentences and get a result that looks OK, looks good enough."
Marketers aren't shy about the strategy.
Prada last week introduced its own holiday effort, a whimsical combination of live action and animation featuring the hand-drawn illustrations of artists led by Disney alumnus John Pomeroy. "That sense of touch expresses a fundamental notion of humanity," the Italian fashion house said in a press release.
Conscious that AI is now powerful enough to re-create animators' handcrafted styles, brands including e.l.f., Prada and Apple also have released behind-the-scenes films of their ads being created. The videos are popular: The behind-the-scenes clip of Apple's claymation Mac Mini ad has been viewed more than 197 million times on Instagram.
But some in the creative community have dubbed the practice "effort signaling" or, more derisively, "process porn." And there is trepidation among animators that AI can be used to fake "making of" videos, too.
One Instagram Reel shows a film crew capturing a giant wave flattening a model city with the caption, "No CGI. No compositing. Just a hand-built miniature Miami and a 40-foot wave tank." It has been viewed nearly 900 million times -- and turned out to be made entirely with AI.
Some are nonetheless sanguine.
"I'm not worried about it as an artist because that's the way I am," said Justin Rasch, the Stunt Puppet Pictures co-founder. "I'm going to do this no matter what happens, and I think that once people's teeth fall out from consuming all this sugary AI, they'll come looking for something human."
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