Higgsfield at Cannes Lions: AI Video Ads Are Already Commercial

AI video advertising has crossed from experiment to default at Higgsfield, the San Francisco AI video startup behind the Cannes-screened 95-minute feature “Hell Grind.” More than 80% of the platform’s activity now sits inside commercial creative projects, the bulk of it social media advertising. The shift, CEO Alex Mashrabov said in an interview with ADWEEK ahead of the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, has moved the production bottleneck from cost to creative judgment.

Mashrabov’s framing matters because it tracks a commercial change already underway, not a forecast about one coming. The 95-minute Hell Grind, produced end-to-end with AI alongside a team of professional directors, is the proof point Higgsfield brought to the Croisette.

Video AI Goes Commercial

Mashrabov frames the shift along two dimensions: utility and pace. From around 2014 to 2024, he said, video AI was treated as a toy for entertainment, with commercial use still limited. “What we’re seeing today is that over 80% of total activity on Higgsfield is associated with commercial creative projects, most of which are specifically around social media advertising,” Mashrabov said. The full conversation runs in Mashrabov’s interview on AI video adoption.

The pace of model releases has accelerated alongside the demand. “We see new models coming out almost every week,” Mashrabov said. “Capabilities that were impossible to imagine a year ago are already becoming available, and we believe this will continue to accelerate the adoption of video AI.”

That adoption has a specific shape on the platform. Most of the commercial work is short-form social advertising, produced by what Higgsfield calls AI-first creators, who use the platform to deliver paid campaigns for brands without traditional production crews.

The 95-Minute Hell Grind Production

The proof point Mashrabov brought to Cannes was Hell Grind, a sci-fi heist film produced end-to-end with AI tools alongside a team of award-winning professional directors. Directed by Aitore Zholdaskali and co-written with Adilkhan Yerzhanov, the film screened during the festival week. Higgsfield positioned the film as evidence that AI-generated video has moved past social clips and advertising into long-form narrative filmmaking. Mashrabov framed the project as a test of whether AI filmmaking was ready for primetime.

The economics broke from the conventions of independent feature work. According to a breakdown of the Cannes industry presentation, Hell Grind was produced for under $500,000, with the majority of the budget allocated to compute costs. A crew of 15 directors, cinematographers, and editors worked primarily from Almaty, Kazakhstan, with the execution phase running roughly two weeks on top of several years of concept and screenplay development.

The generation volume behind that figure was larger than the budget suggested. The first 25 minutes alone required more than 16,000 video generations to land on 253 final shots. Across the full 95-minute cut, Mashrabov told ADWEEK, the team produced roughly 100 hours of AI-generated content before the final film took shape. That ratio of 100 hours of generated footage to 95 minutes of finished film is the central fact about how AI changes a production set. The team ran many takes and kept a small share of each in an iterative workflow.

• Directed by Aitore Zholdaskali and co-written with Adilkhan Yerzhanov
• Produced for under $500,000, with most spend on compute
• Crew of 15 directors, cinematographers, and editors, based primarily in Almaty, Kazakhstan
• Execution phase ran roughly two weeks
• First 25 minutes required 16,000 video generations yielding 253 final shots
• Full film required roughly 100 hours of AI-generated content for 95 minutes of finished cut

There is definitely a feeling of a slot machine.

Mashrabov, the CEO and co-founder of Higgsfield, said this during the Cannes industry presentation. Multi-character scenes and complex staging remain hard for the technology.

What $500 a Minute Buys in AI Video

The unit economics of AI video production have shifted faster than most marketing budgets have caught up. In a January 2026 profile of Mashrabov’s pricing model, he said Higgsfield now produces broadcast-quality output at roughly $500 per minute, down from approximately $100,000 per minute. The same conversation noted 200 times higher cost efficiency in his phrasing, and included the figure that customers with marketing budgets over $100 million now turn 90% of their social media ad creative over to AI generation.

Higgsfield’s own State of AI Video report, built on survey data from over 4,200 creators across 125 countries, found that social media ads that once took weeks to produce can now be created in less than an hour with AI. The report also found that a significant share of consumers already cannot differentiate between AI-generated ads and traditional ads.

Where Creative Taste Becomes the Bottleneck

Creativity and taste are the things we believe are going to remain constant. AI can generate thousands of variations, but marketers still need to define the strategy and decide what best represents the brand.

Mashrabov, the CEO and co-founder of Higgsfield, said this in the ADWEEK interview ahead of the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. His argument is that the human creative director role grows in importance as production cost collapses. Hell Grind required 100 hours of generated footage to arrive at 95 minutes of finished cut. AI generated the variations; humans decided what stayed. The decision rule on what to keep sits at the top of the creative stack. The earlier profile quoted Mashrabov saying that AI-first creators on Higgsfield can cut budgets from $100,000 per minute to roughly $500 per minute. The only remaining bottleneck, in his framing, is communication with clients and defending creative vision.

The same week at Cannes Lions, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis framed creativity as the missing piece for AGI. His was an overlapping argument from a different vantage point, captured in his Cannes Lions remarks on the AGI bottleneck.

For marketing teams watching the cost curve, the consequence is that tools get cheaper and the craft of deciding what to make becomes the scarce input. The State of AI Video report puts a number on that shift, with more than 4,200 creators across 125 countries already producing under those conditions.

Mashrabov’s Forecast for the Next 12 Months

Mashrabov offered two forward-looking claims in the ADWEEK conversation. The first was on output mix: in 12 months, he said, almost all ads will be either AI-generated or AI-assisted. The basis is the State of AI Video report’s finding that a significant share of consumers already cannot differentiate between AI-generated ads and traditional ads.

As that perceptual gap closes, Mashrabov said, brand-side trust in AI creative output rises with it. The second claim was structural. Mashrabov said agentic AI will become the default creative workflow for most marketing teams. He tied the prediction to campaign management, research, and analysis, which he said are also becoming more complex as marketing operations scale.

Showcasing AI Ads at Brandweek Atlanta

Higgsfield’s Cannes week also marked the public launch of a partnership with ADWEEK. It includes a creative competition set to open after the festival, with submissions showcased at Brandweek in Atlanta this September. Mashrabov framed the move as a response to a specific industry pattern: too many ideas die because they are too expensive, too complicated, or too early for traditional production to absorb.

The named collaborators on Hell Grind point to where the company is placing its weight. The Cannes presentation included Chuck Russell, the Hollywood director of The Mask and Eraser. His new venture Neumorphic AI has partnered with Higgsfield on a hybrid production model combining live-action filmmaking with AI-generated environments and visual scale. Russell told the Cannes audience it was the first time in AI he had found the characters themselves charming.

The earlier profile placed Higgsfield’s paying user base at 1 to 2 million, with the company’s expectation that adoption grows at least 20x as video generation AI moves from early-stage users to professional creative teams. The Cannes rollout, the ADWEEK competition, and the Brandweek showcase in Atlanta are the next public checkpoints where that adoption curve gets tested.