We Put It in Our Own Commercial

I spent 20 years building Third Floor around one standard: the work has to be exceptional or it doesn’t ship.

Then AI arrived and I had a choice.

Pretend it wasn’t happening and fall behind. Or figure out how to use it without compromising the standard.

We rebuilt the entire agency around it. Not because it was trendy. Not because clients were asking for it. Because it made the work better. And when something makes the work better, ignoring it isn’t principled. It’s negligent.

Here’s what actually changed.

Rendering that used to take three days takes three hours. Iteration cycles that used to cost a client $20,000 happen for a fraction of that. Production overhead that used to eat half a project’s timeline is mostly gone. We can explore ten directions in the time it used to take to explore two. Clients see more options, make better decisions, and get to market faster.

But the thinking didn’t get faster. The strategy didn’t get cheaper. The creative direction didn’t get automated. Those still take exactly as long as they always did.

Because that’s the part nobody can shortcut.

You can generate a thousand images in an afternoon. You still need someone who knows which one is right. You can produce a brand concept in hours. You still need someone who’s built enough brands to know whether it’ll hold up in six months or fall apart the first time it meets a real application. You can write fifty headlines in ten minutes. You still need someone who’s spent decades developing the instinct to feel which one actually works.

AI accelerated everything around the core creative decisions. The core creative decisions still require a human being who’s been doing this long enough to have real taste, not just opinions.

That’s what we rebuilt around. Not AI as a replacement for creativity. AI as a production layer underneath creative judgment that took 20 years to develop.

And we’re honest about it.

We put “Made with AI” at the end of our own commercial. We tell clients when AI is part of the workflow. We tell them when it isn’t. Some projects are fully AI-assisted. Some are entirely human-crafted from start to finish. We assess every project individually and choose the approach that serves the work, not the one that makes the best case study.

Most agencies won’t do this. They’re using the same tools behind closed doors and hoping nobody asks. They’re scared clients will think the work is worth less. They’re scared the industry will judge them. They’re scared someone on Twitter will call it cheating.

We’re not scared of any of that.

If your process embarrasses you, your process is the problem. Ours doesn’t embarrass us. We’re proud of how we work. The results speak for themselves. The clients keep coming back. The standard hasn’t dropped. If anything, the floor has gone up because we can iterate and refine more aggressively than we ever could when production was the bottleneck.

We’re also transparent because our clients deserve it. When you hire Third Floor, you know exactly how we work. You know whether AI was involved. You know that humans directed everything. You know the work was reviewed, refined, and held to the same standard we’ve always held it to. No surprises. No fine print. No finding out after the fact.

Some people think transparency about AI is risky. We think secrecy about AI is riskier. Trust is hard to build and easy to lose. We’d rather earn it upfront than protect it with silence.

Two decades in this business taught me something that AI will never change: the work is the only thing that matters. How you got there is a conversation worth having. Whether the result is exceptional is not up for debate.

It either is or it doesn’t ship.

That part hasn’t changed. It never will.