Creative directors, in-house studios, agency leads, photographers running brand work. The question we keep hearing isn't whether AI belongs in the pipeline. It's how to actually run it at the standard your brand demands.
Over the last six months, we've been solving for this pipeline with hundreds of brand teams on invideo: enterprise creative leads, in-house studios, performance teams running launches at scale. The same questions kept surfacing: how do you load brand systems as memory? How do you maintain cast and wardrobe consistency across variants? How do you compound what's already working instead of starting from scratch every cycle?
So we're doing a true breakdown. Uniqlo's Linen SS'26 collection as an example. Every step, every model decision, every iteration, every cost. The hero film, the BTS variant, the trial room UGC, the outdoor UGC, all across one project, one brand brain, four formats.
This is the playbook. Built the way enterprise creative teams told us they need.
Before the first ad: building the brain
The first thing brand teams keep getting wrong is treating the agent like a prompt box. It isn't. It's a creative team member that needs onboarding, and the quality of everything downstream depends on what you load up front.
Start by giving it four inputs. In this order.
1. The campaign brief, broad. Open Agent One and tell it the widest version of what you're making. For us: performance ads for Uniqlo's Linen Collection. Not the shot list. Not the script. The shape of the job.
2. Brand language. Visual guidelines. Identity, voice, tone, palette, music sensibility, whatever your brand book already defines. This is what stops the output from looking like generic AI. It's also what makes the agent's suggestions feel like your brand instead of a sanitized average of every brand.
3. The product catalogue. Every outfit, shot from multiple angles, with close-ups under different lighting. The more angles, the better the agent understands fit, fabric, texture, movement. For a category like linen, where the whole pitch is how the fabric behaves, this is non-negotiable.
4. The treatment note. Camera language, lighting, composition. And critically: the don'ts. Brand teams know exactly what they don't want, and most agents will happily produce all of it unless told otherwise.
We gave the agent a reference of an existing Uniqlo ad plus a list of standing don'ts: no plastic-looking fabric, no whip-pans, no moody color grading, no AI-looking humans, among others.
Once this is loaded, Agent One locks it all into project context. Every rule, every product, every preference. It carries it through everything, with no reminders and no re-briefs.
This is the foundation. Get it right once, and the rest of the campaign compounds on top of it.
Ad #1: The Product film that anchors the launch
Every linen campaign needs the showcase piece. The film that lives on the homepage, in the launch email, at the top of the paid funnel. It has to sell the fabric, the fit, the feel, and it has to feel like the brand.
Step 1: Brief the agent like a creative team
Tell Agent One what you want. Not in short list form. In intent.
For us: a fun summer linen showcase film, with a reference video attached. The agent came back with a clarifying question, "Are we thinking of friends-on-a-summer-day energy?", which is exactly what a good creative director asks before touching anything.
That alignment check matters. We confirmed direction, then asked for shot breakdowns. If you're visualising the ad differently, push back here, and the agent will follow.
Step 2: Cast and wardrobe
Casting is where most AI-made ads fall apart. Brand teams cast for the audience, not for "looks good in a render."
Since this campaign was running in the U.S. market, we made our choices accordingly. The agent built character options aligned to that.
One technical note worth flagging: we specified Recraft for the base character generation. Nano Banana Pro and 2 struggle with skin texture; outputs can come out painterly. We made the base characters in Recraft, then upscaled with GPT Image 2 and Nano Banana 2 to get the right finish.
Once the cast was locked, the agent built full multi-angle character sheets (front, three-quarter, back, close-ups) featuring every outfit on every model. Saved to context.
Step 3: Storyboard
With shots, cast, and sheets locked, the agent generates a full storyboard. Ask for multiple options, then pick frames from across them.
A detail worth noting: Agent One reviews its own outputs before showing them to you. On this ad, it caught a frame with anatomical errors and an unnatural pose, and regenerated automatically. That self-check is the difference between "I have to babysit this" and "I can actually delegate."
Step 4: Frames to clips
Storyboard approved. Now generate clips, in batches of five. Enough variety to evaluate, small enough to iterate without burning credits on one bad detail across fifteen clips.
The agent defaulted to Seedance 2.0 here, the right model for this kind of footage. If you want control over the model, name it in the prompt.
Step 5: Voiceover and music
For this film, we wanted to use the music from an existing Uniqlo ad made for the Thai market. The voiceover was in Thai. We asked the agent to translate and adapt for the U.S. cut. Done in one exchange.
Step 6: Edit
Pull everything into Premiere Pro. Finish the cut.
The mid-production pivot that proves the model. Halfway through, we changed the setting from rooftop to beach, to show the fabric in a more natural environment. In a traditional production, that's a full reshoot. Here, it was a chat.
The agent re-generated the entire storyboard against the new location while keeping cast, wardrobe, and character sheets fully intact.
This is the thing brand teams notice first. The cost of a creative change isn't a week and a budget reapproval. It's a message.
WHAT WE SPENT
Ad #2: The BTS Product Demo
Most launches don't fail on the hero film. They fail on what comes after.
You need variants: different visual languages, different placements, different funnel positions. And you need them fast, while the brand brain you just built is still warm.
This is where Agent One's project structure earns its keep.
Step 1: Setting up a new agent
Spin up a new agent inside the same project. Don't re-upload anything. The new agent already knows the visual guidelines, treatment note, catalogue, and standing don'ts. All you do is tell it what you want to build.
For us this was a BTS-style photoshoot commercial.
This separation matters. Your first agent is now a specialist on outdoor product films, and you don't want to disturb that thread. A second agent handles BTS without contaminating the first.
Step 2: Cast and wardrobe
Since it holds all previous context, the new agent automatically asked whether we wanted to reuse cast from the hero film, and which outfit colors we wanted to feature.
Carry-over is one of the underrated unlocks. Same models, same character sheets, different ads. The brand looks coherent across the campaign without anyone manually enforcing it.
Step 3: Directing the camera
BTS lives and dies on movement. Flat camera = fake. Before generating anything, give the agent a clear movement pattern.
We asked for slightly dutch angles, dynamic push-ins on character entries, quick pull-aways on exits. The agent came back with 5-second clips, each with movement planned per outfit.
Step 4: Music and edit
Music makes or breaks a BTS spot. We wanted upbeat, clean ending, no fadeouts. The agent pulled options with Google Lyria 3 Pro. We locked one and moved to Premiere.
WHAT WE SPENT
Notice the ratio. Seven clips generated, seven used. That's what happens when the brand brain is fully loaded and the variant builds on top of an aligned hero film.
Ad #3: UGC Ads - Trial room reviews
The Ad format that most brands want to crack but also is the hardest ad to make with AI. Not because the tech struggles, but because the moment it looks produced, it stops working. The whole point of UGC is that it doesn't look like a brand made it.
This is the format every enterprise team we talked to flagged as the unsolved problem.
Step 1: Start a new project with new visual rules
UGC needs a different project, not just a different agent. The visual language is incompatible with the brand films.
No polished brand visuals. No locked color palettes. No perfect models. References need to feel raw and real.
Step 2: Come up with a scroll-stopping hook
UGC ads earn attention in the first second. Either you have a hook that works, or you don't have an ad. Work with the agent to generate 2-3 hook options, since you'll want to A/B them in the market anyway.
We went with a clean one-take reaction to the outfit's fit and feel in the trial room. Locked the script.
Step 3: Finalising the set and cast
For the ad to feel like a real customer, the cast and location need to look the part. So, we gave Agent One an actual Uniqlo trial room photo for the background, with a slight low angle, the way these videos are typically shot.
Then made granular tweaks like eyeliner adjustments, eyebrow and posture corrections, until we had a UGC character and background that felt natural and almost indistinguishable from a real customer in a trial room.
Step 4: Comparing video model outputs
Since it is extremely important to get motion right on such videos, we generated the same clip in both Kling 3.0 and Seedance 2.0.
Same character. Same outfit. Same prompt. The character held across both. So we picked the one with better movement.
This is how serious teams evaluate models. Not by reading benchmarks. By running them on the actual brief, side by side, on the actual cast.
WHAT WE SPENT
Ad #4: Outdoor UGC Ad
For the final format, we wanted something that felt like creator footage shot outdoors. Think iPhone-style video, natural sunlight, a clean backdrop, and a voiceover carrying the story.
But instead of writing the ad from scratch, we used the structure of a previous winning ad as the starting point. Same architecture, new execution. This is where AI agents start to compound, not just generate
Step 1: Create a new UGC Agent for your project
The brief: a VO-driven outdoor UGC video that looks like it was shot on an iPhone. Model against a grey backdrop, natural sunlight.
Step 2: Learn from your best ad
This is the move that most teams miss. Upload a previously high-performing UGC ad. Ask the agent to transcribe it and use its structure, not the words but the architecture. Hook open, pacing, product reveal, close.
This is how brand teams compound. Your next ad starts at the structure of your best ad, not from scratch.
Step 3: Build the cast around an anchor frame
When you're making a single-model UGC, the cast carries the whole ad so make sure to spend time on this. We went with a Korean model, refined her features iteratively until she felt right and then saved her character sheet to context.
The consistency trick: ask the agent to generate one clean image of the locked character in the final setting. Use that frame as the anchor for every video generation after.
One last note on generation: move the model through different actions and beats across the ad. Otherwise every shot ends up looking like the same loop.
Step 4: Voiceover, music, edit
Since there is no on-camera dialogue here, the voiceover and music carry the whole ad. We went warm and playful, overlaid not lip-synced. Make sure to jam with the agent until the tone is right.
After this, you can pull everything into Premiere and finish the cut.
WHAT WE SPENT
What this actually means
Four ads. Four formats. One project. One brand brain carried through every variant.
But the format count isn't the headline. The headline is what the workflow unlocks.
Brand teams running this pipeline on Agent One are shipping roughly 5x faster than teams still
briefing agencies for every variant. That speed compounds in three places that matter to anyone running a creative org.
Faster shipping. Hero film to full variant spread in a single cycle, not a single quarter.
Easier iterations. A creative pivot, whether a new location, new cast direction, or new market, is a chat, not a reshoot.
Tighter feedback loops. Get the variant in market, read the data, iterate the next version on top of what worked. Not next month. This week.
That's the shift. The brand brain becomes a reusable asset. Every new piece of work makes the next one faster. The teams who internalize this are the ones pulling away.
If you lead a brand team and want to run this pipeline: Agent One is live on invideo. Start a project, load your brand context, and the next campaign will move 5x faster than the last one.
Here’s the full 20-minute walkthrough, covering every chat, every iteration, and every model decision.
