Child’s Play
“Child’s Play” a cartoon about a big idea: how AI is letting total beginners make pro-quality video.
What used to require a full creative team and six-figure budget can now be done by one person in a weekend.
It took PJ Accetturo, a TV and ad commercial editor, 2 days and 2K to create the Kalshi NBA Finals ad using Google Veo 3. Typically, a national TV spot runs $250K or more. That’s less than 1% of the usual cost. And it aired during the Finals, reaching nearly 20M viewers.
There are still hurdles. As a basic user myself, I find that Veo 3 struggles with character consistency, often requiring five to seven tools stitched together. You can’t really reuse characters yet, and you have to rely on brute force generation, for example hundreds of clips to get a few usable shots.
Lip sync is unreliable. Prompting is unpredictable and often gets stuck on repeat. While you can get beautiful footage, you don’t get much control.
However, Google is working on fixing these issues. AI studios will soon deliver pro-quality ads for five figures, compressing costs and cutting agencies out of the loop. What really sets a studio, or any ad agency that wants to remain alive, apart isn’t tooling, it’s the ability to create content people can’t stop watching.
As PJ puts it, “The value is always attention… crack the code on attention as best as possible, and then offer that as value-based pricing.”
Sources:
Emma Roth (June 12, 2025) – Here’s the $2,000 fully AI-generated ad that aired during the NBA Finals – The Verge
Ana Altchek (June 23, 2025) – The filmmaker behind the AI-generated Kalshi ad built an AI studio. It didn’t kick off until Veo 3 launched. – Business Insider
Garet Sloane (June 12, 2025) – How Kalshi made an AI ad using Google Veo 3. – Adage
