Behind DermiCool: building India's first fully AI-generated ad in 30 days.
Behind the scenes of DermiCool Warriors, India's first fully AI-generated digital ad. What it took, what nearly broke, and what we learned about shipping broadcast-grade work in 30 days.
The full story behind India's first fully AI-visual-generated digital ad. Co-authored by Rishi Bhattacharjee and Shruti Gupta.
In early 2025, Emami briefed us and Wondrlab on a film for the DermiCool summer campaign. Anime-styled. Gamified. Hero protagonists battling literal heat. The kind of brief that, in 2023, would have meant a four-month animation pipeline and a budget that didn't fit the window.
We pitched something else: ship the entire film in 30 days, fully AI-generated, broadcast-grade.
By 2025, 72% of marketers ranked generative AI as the most important shift in their work (Mediaocean). Most were using it to make individual assets faster. The DermiCool brief was a test of something harder: could AI carry an entire branded film, end to end, at broadcast quality?
What it actually took
Week 1: Locking the visual world. Anime style needs internal consistency. We trained reference styles, locked colour palettes, and built a character bible before a single shot was generated.
Week 2: Storyboard to sequence. The hardest part wasn't generation. It was continuity, making sure character X in shot 4 was visually the same character X in shot 14. We rebuilt the storyboard process around frame-to-frame consistency checks, run before any final generation.
Week 3: Generation, comp, edit. Final shots generated. Composited. Edited. Sound design layered. This is the week where a traditional pipeline would still be in week 6.
Week 4: Delivery. Final colour grade. Approvals. Shipping.
What nearly broke
Continuity. AI tools in 2025 still drift. We rebuilt three sequences when a character's costume mutated mid-scene.
Brand approvals. Emami's brand team had to learn what they were approving in real time. We invested heavily in early frame approvals to compress later cycles.
Sound design. The visual side moved fast; foley and sound design had to keep up. We brought sound design in from week 1 instead of the traditional week 5.
The result
DermiCool Warriors. YouTube's Best of Ads India 2025. 30 days, end-to-end.
More importantly: a pipeline we've now run on three subsequent campaigns. The 30-day timeline isn't a one-off. It's the new floor.
What we learned
- AI doesn't compress every step. It compresses the wait. Approvals, briefs, decisions still take human time. Generation took hours.
- Front-load brand approvals. Frame-level approvals in week 1 saved weeks of rework in weeks 3 and 4.
- Sound is not a finishing step. It's a foundation. Bring it in early.
- The bottleneck moves to taste. When you can ship 100 versions of a shot in a day, the question becomes: which one is the right one? That's a creative-director decision, not an AI decision.
Old-world craft. New-world pace.
