09/23/2026
A big beauty brand just drew a line we think a lot of brands are close to drawing.
Olaplex's CMO said plainly: they'll use AI for concepting. They won't use it to generate the humans or the hair in their ads — because that's literally what the brand sells.
When the product is human, synthetic content isn't a production hack. It's a category miss.
Here's the follow-up most brands aren't ready for: if you won't generate the human, you need real people at real volume — and every one of them rights-cleared before they can run in paid. That's not a creative problem. It's an operations problem, and it's the part most brands haven't solved yet.
Where does your team draw the line?