Yes, the headlines focused on multi-billion dollar investments. Yes, there is a lot of speculation as to why Disney chose OpenAI over Google and is currently suing them for alleged copyright infringement. These are fair questions and important.

But they are not the most important ones, at least for marketers.

The bigger story is that this deal signals where the economics of content, advertising, and attention are headed. Disney didn’t partner with OpenAI to make better creative. We partnered with OpenAi to create average creative work at scale.

This distinction is important.

Before we get there, a quick refresher. Disney agrees to license more than 200 characters across Marcel, Pixar, Star Wars, and its classic catalog to OpenAI’s generation systems, including Sora and ChatGPT’s image tools. In return, Disney received an exclusive partnership stake. The dollar figure grabbed headlines. Intellectual property is real currency.

It’s clear what you’re getting with OpenAI. As generative AI capabilities converge and model quality becomes a critical factor, differentiation will move elsewhere. Exclusive content creates stickiness. Familiar characters do emotional work that generic output cannot. These are things that make people want to stay, experiment, and create.

What Disney gains is positioning, not immediate profits. The company has spent a century extracting value from intellectual property by controlling where, when and how it appears. now. Place that IP in a system built for speed, volume, and repeatability.

This is where marketers should stop and think.

The conversation around generative AI has largely been framed around efficiency: faster production, cheaper video, and more output. This framework understates what is actually changing. It is not primarily a change in production, but a change in how meaning circulates.

James Kirkham, co-founder of brand consulting firm Iconic, said once characters and mascots can live within a generative system, they become less event-based and begin to become more environmentally conscious. They can appear anywhere, in any tone, next to anything. they move faster. They appear more often, he added.

Its scale is appealing, but also precarious.

“The bigger threat to me is not that low-quality AI output becomes the norm, but that a lot of ‘good enough’ creative becomes the norm,” Kirkham says. “With tools like Sora, you can easily clear those first three seconds of attention without any special gimmicks behind it. Over time, even unsuspecting viewers are trained to lower their expectations, making everything a little more expected and noisy, eroding the premium demographic that agencies and brands have historically competed against.”

Brand equity derives its power from context. Historically, they appeared intentionally in carefully staged narratives that reinforced authority and intent. The generation system eliminates those guardrails. Context is optional. frequency increases. Specificity is lost.

This is where the “just right” economy becomes a real risk.

“Clients should ask which works are still worth their time, money and above all actual human judgment, or which works should be intentionally made disposable,” Kirkham said.

The loudest criticisms of AI-generated content are artistic: it’s too general, too synthetic, and too identical. The abbreviation “AI slop” captures the vice, but misses the mechanics.

The real change is economic. Generative AI dramatically lowers the barrier to creating enough watchable content to grab attention. It’s not great content. It’s not unique brand storytelling. Content that works. Content that clears the first few seconds and keeps the feed moving.

At scale, it quietly retrains the audience. Expectations go down without anyone noticing. Content becomes more predictable, more interchangeable, and louder. Over time, the premium tier where brands and agencies once competed on judgment, restraint, and originality has faded.

The threat is not low quality output. Please ignore inappropriate creatives. This threat features a ton of talented creatives that have become the default aesthetic.

Brands will then be forced to make strategic choices.

Characters and mascots either become flexible assets designed to exist within an invited and editable system (fast, adaptable, and disposable by design), or they remain cultural symbols that are rarely and intentionally displayed, Kirkham said. Either approach will work. The difficult thing is to continue doing both for a long time.

“As characters become more ambient, endlessly generated, and free of context, they lose much of the inherent ownership and authority that we’ve become accustomed to for decades,” Kirkham says. “It spreads at the speed of a meme. Brands’ job now is to set the rules before the platforms, because once that line is crossed, it’s very difficult to re-establish meaning.”

This is the context in which advertising economics begins to operate.

For years, one of the biggest barriers to technology platforms capturing a larger share of TV ad budgets has been the economics of content. Producing TV-quality programming is expensive, time-consuming, and culturally out of step with companies built around automation and ionization. Even streaming platforms that have tried to recreate television have inherited the same cost securities.

Generative AI changes that equation.

If we can steer viewing habits towards AI-generated content, content that benefits from economies of scale rather than human labor, that barrier breaks down. The content is the product input. Economically, cloud computing is starting to become a trend over Hollywood movie production.

In that world, the goal is not to create the best work. It’s about spending time efficiently.

Two hours of daily viewing doesn’t require two hours of premium storytelling. You need to watch two hours of frictionless content that clears your minimum attention threshold. Generation systems can already do this and are rapidly improving.

If platforms succeed in shifting even a portion of viewing time to AI-generated content that they control, and insist that ad share should follow audience share, they open the door to budgets that have historically been reserved for TV.

Opening the door to TV budgets is only a first-order effect. Secondary effects are more significant.

When platforms are rewarded for efficiently occupying time rather than for creating differentiation, brand meaning becomes input rather than outcome.

The “just right” economy begins to take advantage of recognizable systems and borrow their capital to make average content acceptable at scale.

Numbers you need to know

$2 billion: Total sales achieved by X in the first nine months of 2025

30,000 people: Total viewers at peak time for Kim Kardashian’s Skims TikTok live show

2029: The year when the Oscar ceremony will be broadcast exclusively on YouTube from ABC.

$100 billion: The amount of funding OpenAI hopes to raise from a broader range of investors to continue running and training its AI models.

what we are reading

Meta tolerates rampant ad fraud from China to protect billions of dollars in revenue

According to Reuters, the tech giant itself has calculated that 19% of the funds it received from Chinese companies in 2024, or more than $3 billion, will come from advertising fraud, illegal gambling, pornography and other prohibited content.

OpenAI is considering raising tens of billions of dollars at a valuation of about $750 billion

According to The Information, the AI ​​platform is in early talks with investors to raise as much as $100 billion, which, if successful, would add to the huge cash reserves needed to train and run AI models.

TikTok live shopping becomes popular in the US with Kim Kardashian and cookies

Kim Kardashian’s loungewear brand Skims’ participation on TikTok Live further gave the format legitimacy — at its peak, 30,000 TikTok users tuned in, flooded with orders, and watched the reality star’s first-ever live shopping event, according to Bloomberg.

The Oscars are headed to YouTube after more than 50 years on ABC

More than half a century after it aired on ABC, the Oscars ceremony has signed a deal that gives YouTube exclusive worldwide broadcast rights to the event and pre-show and behind-the-scenes content from 2029 to 2033, marking a shift in viewing patterns from linear TV to streaming platforms, Axios said.

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