Notes from the lab · What it costs
What an FMCG campaign actually costs to run on AI, line by line
Every deck about AI production says "10x cheaper" and then shows no numbers. This note shows the numbers. It is built from a real campaign shape we run for FMCG accounts: 1 hero film of about 45 seconds, 12 performance cutdowns, 30 statics, and variants in 4 languages. Roughly 60 finished assets.
Two things before the table. First, these are ranges, because retry rates move with how tight the brand system is. Second, we count everything, including the generations nobody ever sees. Most published numbers quietly leave those out.
The cost sheet
| Line item | What it covers | Range |
|---|---|---|
| Model inference, video | Hero film and cutdowns, including every rejected take | ₹30,000 to ₹55,000 |
| Model inference, image | Statics, key visuals, resizes, including retries | ₹6,000 to ₹12,000 |
| Voice and music | Licensed VO in 4 languages, track licensing | ₹10,000 to ₹18,000 |
| Creative direction | Human hours: brief, look development, edit decisions | 50 to 70 hours |
| QC and review | Human pass on every asset before the client sees it | 15 to 25 hours |
| Compliance | Disclosure labels, records of what was generated and how | 2 to 4 hours |
| Infra and delivery | Hosting, versioning, handoff | Under ₹5,000 |
The pattern worth noticing: the machine lines are small and falling. The human lines are the real budget, and they do not go to zero. They move up the stack, from executing shots to directing a system.
The number everyone gets wrong
Generation is cheap. Keepers are not. On hero-film frames we see roughly 6 generations for every 1 that survives review. On statics it is closer to 2 to 1. So when someone quotes you a per-generation price, multiply it by the retry ratio before you compare it to anything.
This is also why "cost per asset" quotes vary so wildly between vendors. The honest metric is cost per approved asset. Everything in the table above is counted against approved output, waste included.
Against the traditional sheet
The same campaign shot conventionally carries a different set of lines: a shoot day or two, location, talent and usage fees, a post house, and 6 to 10 weeks of calendar. For the accounts we have moved over, the production line lands at roughly a third of what it was, and the calendar compresses from weeks to days.
One worked example we can publish: for Neeman's we delivered 12 films in 17 days at about a third of the previous production cost. The account's ROAS on that work ran 21.07x against a 3.4x benchmark. The production saving is real, but the speed is what changed how the brand plans campaigns.
What this means for a brand your size
- Budget for direction and review hours. That is where quality is made, and it is the line brands under-resource first.
- Ask any vendor for their retry ratio and their cost per approved asset. If they cannot answer, they have not measured it.
- Expect the machine lines to fall every quarter. Model prices dropped through 2025 and 2026 and we pass that through, since the system swaps models without a migration.
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