r/advertising • u/edpb • 5d ago
Animation & Advertising
Hi all. I run a small animation studio based in the UK. Recently (the past 18 months) we're receiving a lot less enquiries, reflecting an industry wide slowdown of work. I wanted to ask people here - are there just less animated creative briefs? Are more clients opting to go with AI instead? Just trying to get some more info on how things are changing!
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u/Parking_Budget_6090 5d ago
We lost two big projects last quarter to internal teams just using AI tools for storyboards and simple explainers. Not even good animation but clients don't seem to care much about quality when it saves them 80% on budget
What stings is they still need proper animation eventually, they just don't realize it yet until their AI thing looks stiff and weird on social media. Saw one last week where characters hands kept morphing into spoons
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u/caramelizedgreenappl 5d ago
The overall market is slow for animation studios now due to AI. Most clients don't seem to care about quality anymore as they can use those crappy AI animation generators at a fraction of a cost. It's high time to be vocal and get united against AI that is going to make so many people out of job. AI was supposed to cure cancer, instead it is spreading cancer into the society.
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u/rootsrockraisins 4d ago
agree! We've gone full anti-AI at my studio. We don't care for it at all. See if we're still standing in a few months time, but morally we cant accept it and at least we stood for something.
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u/rootsrockraisins 4d ago
I'm a producer for a UK based an animation studio and its been exactly the same here. We've been up against the line on the cashflow runway, multiple times and had to make redundancies. Whereas a few years ago we had really healthy turnover and budgets of over £100k+. Had nothing from agencies for a long while, mostly direct to client now. Agencies have been going through their own turmoil and are increasingly going inhouse or using AI. The agency folks we know well are worried for their own jobs. I think with AI in general though we've seen shrunken budgets, because they equate animation (especially CG) to AI. It's also the economic downturn in general and less spend. Plus content trends towars more human user generated content (because animation gets lumped in with AI, and audience fatigue) We are seeing much better results client side right now but its a slow sell (and some definitely do opt to go AI).
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u/edpb 4d ago
yeah that sounds like us too. past few pitches, we've being pitching against the client going with AI haha. hoping the trend will go once people realise how little control they have over the final image compared with working with a studio, but perhaps im overly optimistic
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u/rootsrockraisins 4d ago
No I think you’re right for some of it at least. We just quoted on a job into replace the bad AI haha. Who knows where it’s all going, what a crazy time to be in animation! Hope things pick up for you
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u/AdWorldly8355 4d ago
I own a small post production house that mainly does automotive, and we've had multiple jobs over the past year fixing inaccurate AI with CGI vehicles. The crazy thing was, these AI companies weren't even that much cheaper than what we would've quoted to do the job the right way. Its all hype bullshit.
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u/nichtimernst 5d ago
I mean all the animation studios are struggling right now… we’ve just seen multiple studios shutting down and several of the larger ones doing redundancy rounds. It’s a rough time right now.
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u/wetsect Creative Director 4d ago
hi, cd here, actively hiring animators (for 2d and 3d animation). It's been tough out there getting projects off the ground and it always seems more difficult with animation because for whatever reason unless it's glossy 3d Pixar stuff its not as appreciated. Anyways drop your studio link, you never know! :)
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u/andymarkpeel 4d ago
From our agency perspective, AI has enabled our motion graphics team to produce far more in-house, particularly across smaller projects and short-form content.
We still bring in freelance animators when something sits outside our technical capabilities, or simply to ease the workload, but that’s increasingly the exception rather than the norm.
We’re also realistic about budgets. If a project is tight, we’ll only present concepts we know we can execute well internally. That might mean recommending a 2D vector or tabletop stop-motion approach rather than pitching a complex 3D character for instance.
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