The necessity of choice
TJ Sponzo, newly appointed as Commercial Director at Electric Theatre Collective, explores what a 60-year-old French film made of still photographs can teach us about advertising, at a time when AI is reducing the need for creative decision-making.
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I came up in an industry built on thirty seconds. Thirty seconds to make someone feel something, remember something, want something. Every frame was a decision: a lens, a cut, a line delivered one way and not another. The format was a discipline.
Then came fifteen seconds, then six. Somewhere between the :30 and the :06, something quieter happened than shrinking attention spans: we started losing the habit of making decisions at all.
Every frame was a decision: a lens, a cut, a line delivered one way and not another.
That matters now, because AI has arrived at exactly the moment we're most vulnerable to a seductive misunderstanding: that the technology means we no longer have to choose. Prompt it, generate a hundred options, pick whichever one the room doesn't hate. No point of view required.
But the absence of a choice isn't efficiency. It's the absence of an idea.
Still from the 1962 French sci-fi film made by Chris Marker, La Jetée.
The film with one moving image
In 1962, Chris Marker made La Jetée, the French sci-fi film that would later inspire 12 Monkeys. Twenty-eight minutes, composed almost entirely of still photographs, except for one moving image: a woman waking, blinking, looking into the camera. One shot of motion in a film of stills, and it lands like a thunderclap.
La Jetée remains one of the most influential films ever made, not despite its constraint but because of it. Marker didn't have less choice than a filmmaker with a full camera package. He had more intention. Every still was a decision, and the one moment of motion was the most deliberate decision of all.
Every still was a decision, and the one moment of motion was the most deliberate decision of all.
That's the lesson we keep having to relearn. The still image evolved into motion, and painters didn't disappear. People said digital was going to kill film. What actually happened is that the tools opened the door for new talent, and the people who thrived brought craft to the new machinery.
The revolution was never the sensor. It was never going to be the model, either.
Trained on us
There's an uncomfortable truth here: these models learned from everything we digitised. AI didn't invent its aesthetic – it absorbed ours, the way an artist painting over another painting on the same canvas is in conversation with the layer beneath, not stealing from it. We're in another of those moments: a new layer going down over generations of craft. That layer only means something if the hand holding the brush knows why it's moving.
AI didn't invent its aesthetic – it absorbed ours, the way an artist painting over another painting on the same canvas is in conversation with the layer beneath.
Innovation knows where it lives
Look at Tesla. It took the traditional auto purchase – a roughly 46-touchpoint process built up over a century of dealerships – and reimagined it into something closer to ordering from Domino's. Configure, click, delivered.
That's real innovation, but notice where: the transaction. The design, the engineering, the value proposition – those were built with craft and intention. They chose where innovation belonged, and where craft had to hold.
Two wildly different stories, one lesson: innovation and craft aren't rivals. The innovators who win know exactly which decisions to reinvent. And which ones to protect.
Now look at Obsession, the film dubbed this generation's The Blair Witch Project. Made for around $750,000 by first-time director Curry Barker, it has out-grossed Blair Witch’s 27-year record as the biggest horror hit ever made on a sub-$1M budget. The narrative is "lightning in a bottle," but what people miss is the intention behind it: years developing his craft on YouTube, honing tension and audience relationship one short at a time.
That's why it resonates. It's the same reason Christopher Nolan's work lands at the opposite end of the budget spectrum: intention, curation, and craft, applied without compromise. Two wildly different stories, one lesson: innovation and craft aren't rivals. The innovators who win know exactly which decisions to reinvent. And which ones to protect.
Official trailer for Obsession, the film dubbed this generation's The Blair Witch Project.
Why this matters to advertising
Here is the question every brand should ask before it generates anything: if you don't have anything to say, why say it at all?
The industry is about to produce more content than ever, at nearly zero marginal cost. Most of it will be noise. But noise isn't the death of craft. It's the condition in which craft and curation thrive. The flood doesn't drown the crafted work; it makes it unmistakable.
The same paradox cuts both ways. A young filmmaker's idea can now resonate with an audience it might never have found; that's the gift. Things that never needed to exist will be made by the millions; that's the cost. Craft is what lives in the gap between the two.
Data can tell you where people are. Only an idea can give them a reason to come to you.
Which brings us to the industry's favourite word: targeting. Wouldn't you rather drive an audience than target one? Targeting finds people who already fit the model; driving an audience means giving people something worth moving toward. An idea strong enough that they seek it out, share it, build identity around it. Coca-Cola's partnership with Disney and Marvel wasn't a correlation between the product and Marvel fans; synonymity with that pop culture universe made the drink epic in its own right, animation acting as the conduit.
Data can tell you where people are. Only an idea can give them a reason to come to you.
This is a moment in advertising where great ideas, great craft, and great collaboration will thrive – whether that's a thirty -second ad or a six-second TikTok. But that outcome is not built on technology. It is built on the choices behind it.
