Why most small brands run no video ads at all

A small skincare brand raises its paid social budget for the fourth quarter in a row. Reach climbs. Return on ad spend holds, then starts to slide. The growth deck says what every growth deck says next: add video. Two quarters later, the budget's still growing. The video count is still zero.

That's not a contradiction. It's what happens to almost every small or midsize brand that tries to add video to a plan built on static ads. The blocker was never a shortage of ad budget, and it wasn't a lack of interest or a lack of marketing skill. It was that making the ad itself meant a separate process: booking talent, coordinating a shoot, waiting on footage, and sitting through a round of revisions before anything was ready to run. That process carries its own cost, one an ad budget alone doesn't cover.

Key takeaways

• Most small brands run no video ads because making one has meant a full production chain, not because they lack ad budget or interest.
• The production chain has always been the same: booking talent, coordinating a shoot, waiting on footage, and living through revisions.
• U.S. digital video ad spend is projected to reach roughly $72 billion in 2025 (IAB), so demand for video keeps growing even as most small brands stay locked out of it.
• D2C brands, agencies, and marketplaces all hit the same wall at different scales: no video team, no margin for per-client production, or no way to ask thousands of merchants to shoot their own content.
• Most AI ad tools still assume footage exists somewhere. CreativeAI starts from a product page instead, and what it can generate from that page keeps expanding as the product evolves.
• The real question was never whether video ads are worth it. It was whether a small brand could get one made without a production team. That's the barrier that's changing.

How video ads are made today: script, talent, edit, and platform sizing

Five years ago, a video ad meant a production company: a director, a crew, a rented space, and a schedule measured in weeks. Today, most of that chain has moved into software. A script gets written, a voice and on-screen talent get selected, the footage gets edited, and the final cut gets sized for whatever platform it's running on, without a separate vendor for each step.

That shift is real. Talent, editing, and platform sizing used to each require their own specialist. Now they mostly sit inside one workflow.

Knowing what modern production looks like sharpens the next question: if the chain got this much shorter, why hasn't it reached most small brands yet?

Why small brands still don't run video ads, even as demand grows

“Small brands don't run video ads” isn't quite right. Most want to, and most aren't short on the marketing skill to run a campaign once an ad exists. What they're short on is a way to produce the ad itself without a process they don't have in-house and can't easily hire out.

The chain is the same regardless of brand size: find and book talent, coordinate a shoot, wait for footage to come back, then go through a round or two of revisions before anything is ready to run. Skip any one of those steps and the ad doesn't get made. A five-person team selling a physical product doesn't have a spare week for any of it, let alone all four.

This isn't a shrinking category, either. U.S. digital video ad spend is projected to reach roughly $72 billion in 2025, up from $64 billion the year before, growing two to three times faster than total ad spend, according to the 2025 IAB Digital Video Ad Spend & Strategy Report. Demand for video keeps rising. Most of the brands who'd want in on it are still priced out, not by the media spend, but by what it takes to get the ad made in the first place.

Who the production barrier shuts out: D2C brands, agencies, and marketplaces

The production barrier doesn't show up the same way for everyone.

A D2C brand on Shopify usually has no video team and no line item for one. Booking a crew for a single product launch doesn't make sense at their revenue, so video stays a someday project while competitors with bigger budgets run the same platforms without that constraint.

An agency managing a large roster of small business clients hits a different wall. Producing video for a handful of accounts at a time is expensive enough. Producing it for all of them, at a margin that makes the work worth taking, isn't realistic with a full production process attached to every account.

A marketplace with thousands of merchants faces the same problem at a larger scale. It can't expect individual sellers to shoot their own content, and it can't run a production team for every listing on the platform. Without a way to generate ads without per-seller effort, most of that merchant base runs no video at all.

Three different businesses. One shared cause, and one product built to remove it for all three: CreativeAI starts from a product page instead of a shoot, so none of the three has to solve the production problem before they can run a single ad.

What removes the barrier: inside CreativeAI's production process

Most tools built to help with this still start from the same assumption: that footage already exists somewhere, a clip, a product photo, something to feed in. What they offer is speed: turn a photo into a video variant faster, resize a clip for several platforms in one pass, and cut a script down automatically. Useful, if the hard part is already behind you.

CreativeAI starts from what a brand already has: a product page. Paste the URL, and the Creative AI Agent runs it through a defined process instead of a production chain:

None of those eight steps needs a shoot, a camera, or a callback from a production vendor. The chain that used to require a different specialist at every stage, talent, a director, an editor, a media buyer to size the final cut, now runs against the same product page URL from start to finish.

Competitors make production faster. CreativeAI makes the shoot optional.

That's a different kind of barrier removal. It isn't a faster version of the same process. It's a way to skip the part that was keeping most small brands out of video advertising in the first place. It's also the current shape of a process that keeps expanding: what CreativeAI can generate from a single product page today already covers more ground than it did a few months ago.

Is video advertising worth it for a small brand? Only once production isn't the cost

Yes, once making the ad itself doesn't require a production budget on top of the media budget.

The “is video worth it” question usually gets treated as an ROI question: will this convert well enough to justify the spend. For most small brands, that was never really the question being answered. The real cost wasn't the ad spend. It was the cost of getting a finished ad to exist at all: the talent, the shoot, the editing, the time.

Once that cost drops, the ROI question gets a lot easier to answer, because it's finally being asked about the media spend alone, not about the media spend plus a production process bolted onto it. That's the cost CreativeAI removes: the ad exists as soon as the product page does.

See what CreativeAI produces from your product page

The barrier covered here isn't specific to one kind of brand. It shows up for a Shopify merchant, an agency, and a marketplace in slightly different forms, but the cause is the same: making the ad has always cost more than running it.

That's the gap CreativeAI is built to close. Turn Any Product Page Into a Video Ad. No Filming Required. walks through exactly what a single product page URL turns into, format by format, and what's live today.

Or paste your own product page URL at creativeai.anoki.ai and see what it generates.