Generative AI company Runway has released a report examining the impact of its technology on media production at hundreds of large enterprises, claiming users have achieved substantial reductions in production costs and turnaround times.
The longitudinal study covers Runway’s use across feature films, advertising, branded content, games, editorial and other forms of visual media. According to the company, the financial comparisons were reported by customers and measured against the cost of completing similar work during the previous year.
Runway said production costs among its enterprise customers commonly fell by two to three orders of magnitude, with significant reductions also recorded in project timelines.
Among the anonymised examples included in the report, a national financial services company reportedly reduced the cost of producing a broadcast commercial from more than US$5 million to between US$3000 and US$4000. The resulting AI-generated campaign was subsequently broadcast during NFL Sunday programming.
A homewares retailer was said to have replicated visual projects previously costing US$800,000 for less than US$10,000, while a global consulting company recreated a campaign normally valued at between US$300,000 and US$600,000 for approximately US$3000. The latter project was completed within a two-day request-for-proposal window.
At the smaller end of the production scale, a US cable network reportedly automated an end-credit production process that had previously cost between US$10,000 and US$15,000 per season, reducing the cost to approximately US$10 per run.
Runway also claimed AI-generated material was increasingly being used as finished content rather than solely for concept development or previsualisation. Work created using the platform has reportedly appeared on national television, during major sporting events and in trailers for a major entertainment franchise.
In the games sector, a 16.5-minute AI-generated narrative film received executive approval, while AI-generated advertising concepts outperformed existing campaign material in direct A/B testing, according to the report.
The findings suggest some customers are beginning to redirect substantial portions of their production budgets towards AI-enabled workflows. One homewares retailer is reportedly transferring between US$5 million and US$6 million in annual production expenditure from conventional production to AI, while a Fortune 50 technology company claimed savings of US$97,000 a month on photography.
Time savings were also reported across advertising, games and broadcasting. A global advertising group reduced the production time for social content featuring a US insurance brand’s mascot from between two and three months to approximately three hours. The workflow covered video generation, voice cloning and lip synchronisation.
A mobile game studio working with a major superhero property reportedly replaced a four-to-five-person, two-week asset-production process with a workflow completed by one person in less than three hours. Elsewhere, a major game publisher reduced concept-design time from 30 days to one day, while a European broadcaster accelerated visual-effects work for live productions by a factor of three.
One game studio developed an automated pipeline capable of moving from the identification of a trending topic through asset generation, legal review and publication in less than an hour. The studio increased its weekly advertising output from 13 pieces to between 75 and 100 without expanding its production team. Runway said several of those AI-generated advertisements produced measurable downloads and revenue.
Other examples included a five-person AI team at a UK broadcaster producing between 800 and 1000 advertisements annually across more than 50 sub-brands. The broadcaster estimated that the workflow saved 46,000 hours across the organisation.
A travel platform generated approximately 8000 property videos through Runway’s API, while a sportswear company completed a back-to-school campaign after its budget was cut by 75 per cent. That operation processed 210 products a day, producing nine videos for each product at an average cost of approximately US$13 per product.
Runway said adoption was generally increasing after the completion of initial trials. A consulting company expanded its deployment from 20 to 100 seats in one year, while a Nordic national broadcaster increased its planned deployment from 20 to 50 seats. A global production group recorded 96 per cent seat activation among more than 70 production companies at the time of renewal.
In more mature deployments, AI has reportedly become a primary production method. One retailer now creates 75 per cent of its visual media with AI, while a major game publisher uses Runway to produce half of the marketing content for its flagship shooter franchise. An independent film studio is also using generative video to create approximately 80 per cent of its full-film animatics before live-action photography begins.
Runway said the next stage of adoption would extend beyond cost reduction and faster production. The company expects enterprises to use generative AI to develop highly targeted creative material, respond to events in real time and produce formats that would previously have been impractical because of budget or scheduling constraints.
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