Traditional media production is dying. Make more content anyway.

I've been producing commercials, documentaries and brand films for twenty years. Started in a reggaeton studio. Ended up running a production company that works with UNICEF, Pepsi, BBDO and Ogilvy.

So it feels a little strange to say this out loud.

The model I grew up in is going away.

The one big commercial a year. The agency retainer. The six figure shoot with a crew of thirty and four months of pre-production. That whole thing is shrinking and it isn't coming back.

But people hear that and draw the wrong conclusion.

They assume it means brands need less content. It's the opposite. Brands need more than they've ever needed, and it has to be better.

Think about where attention actually lives now. A brand isn't competing with other brands for a 30 second slot. It's competing with a guy in his kitchen filming on a phone who gets 400,000 views because he's actually funny. It's competing with a podcast. A YouTube channel. A group chat.

You don't win that with one beautiful film a year. You win it by showing up consistently, on channels you control, sounding like a real person.

That's a volume problem and a quality problem at the same time. Which is why most companies are stuck.

The old way can't produce that much. And the cheap way produces stuff nobody believes.

The believability part is not soft

I keep hearing “content is content, just get it out there.” I don't buy it.

Everybody can smell fake now. We've all been trained on it. You scroll past the AI voiceover, the stock footage, the caption that came out of a template. You don't even think about it, you just keep going.

Trust is the only thing that's actually scarce anymore. And you can't generate it.

So the bar didn't drop. It went up. You need more content and it needs to be real. Those two things fight each other, and that fight is the problem worth solving right now.

Where AI actually fits

I use these tools every day. Claude Code, n8n, generative video, all of it. I'm not here to tell you they're bad.

But most companies are pointing them at the wrong layer.

They're using AI to write their captions and generate their brand videos, which is the part customers actually feel, while somebody on the team still sends appointment confirmations by hand forty times a week.

Should be the other way around.

Automate the invisible stuff. The confirmations, the follow ups, the same data typed into four systems, the handoffs nobody wants to own. That's where the hours are going, and no brand ever got worse because that got fixed.

Then take those hours and put people on the part that matters.

That's not a philosophical position for me, it's arithmetic. If a small team gets fifteen hours a week back, that's fifteen hours of actual making. That's how you get volume without getting slop.

What this means if you're a brand

Stop thinking of yourself as a company that buys media. Start thinking of yourself as a company that makes it.

Own the channels. Build the audience. Have a real voice that a real person is responsible for. Publish consistently instead of perfectly.

And build the machinery underneath, because otherwise you'll do it for three weeks and quit, like everybody does.

What we're doing about it

At VRTKL we do both halves now. We make the video, audio and brand work. And we build the systems that make producing it at volume possible.

Honestly, that wasn't a strategy. Clients kept asking us to fix how things ran, not just how they looked, so we learned.

I still make music. I still direct. I'm in a studio most weeks. Not out of nostalgia. I don't think you can advise anybody on making real things if you've stopped making them yourself.

I could be wrong about the timeline. Maybe the old model has more life in it than I think, especially here in Honduras where things move slower.

But I'd rather be early than right on time.

If you're a brand trying to work out what to build, or you just want to argue with me about this, my inbox is open.