03/03/2026
The ad industry has spent the last year debating whether AI will replace human creativity. At Cactus, we got tired of talking about it, so we decided to test it.
We believe AI isn’t a threat to the creative soul; it’s a force multiplier for our collective imagination. To prove it, we shut down the agency for two hours, threw out the job titles, and hosted the first-ever Cactus Prompt-a-Thon.
We built cross-functional teams - pairing Art Directors with Finance, Media Planners with Project Managers - and handed them the keys to Google’s Veo (Flow) model. Their mission? Direct a 15-30 second cinematic film from scratch using a bizarre set of shared ingredients (shoutout to the sneezing green toad).
Why does this kind of collaboration matter to us? Because true innovation doesn't happen in silos. When we put powerful generative tools into the hands of mixed teams, the results were unhinged, hilarious, and undeniably brilliant. It proved that while AI can generate pixels, it still takes human friction, debate, and vision to direct the story.
At Cactus, we know that AI collaboration isn't just about working faster - it’s about dreaming bigger, and we are already dreaming bigger than ever before!
