Paper Moose turns 15 this year, a milestone the agency says it is proud of and one worth marking. But, it notes, there is no doubt the next 15 years are going to be even wilder.
The agency began as a handful of entrepreneurs in a garage, riding the first wave of digital video production. The democratisation of camera technology and editing software meant smaller companies could suddenly compete with traditional production houses. That wave carried Paper Moose from a filmmaker collective into a full-service agency, and now in 2026, it finds itself facing a far larger AI automation wave.
According to Nick Hunter, Founder, CEO and ECD of Paper Moose, the question is no longer whether AI will dramatically transform the industry. In what he describes as the industrial revolution for knowledge work, the focus is now on what will be left for humans to do.
Hunter explains that the agency talks internally about the difference between tasks requiring intelligence and those requiring geist: “The German word for ghost, spirit, that X-factor animating truly creative work.
“Raw intelligence tasks can be automated. Tasks requiring Geist cannot. There’s a whole ecosystem of agencies promising to produce great creative quickly and affordably with AI, but they are misguided – for an unintuitive and technical reason. Today’s AI systems cannot and will likely never produce good creative for two reasons: because of how how the ai labs are incentivised to validate, measure and improve their models, and also in how reinforcement learning works.”
Hunter says AI excels at anything that can be tracked via a benchmark and optimised through reinforcement learning. While it is possible to train a model in areas with clear, verifiable outcomes, such as chess, he argues creative work does not operate in the same way: “You could argue a ‘creative’ benchmark could be developed and you could hypothetically sit a world-renowned creative director in front of a million sets of creative and have them pick winners until the model learns to choose exactly as they would – assuming that creative director’s tastes are uniform and unchanging. But even then you have frozen that single sensibility. You have lost the diversity of creative outlooks that makes what we would say is a truly great creative idea stand out and resonate with human beings. And unless there’s a fundamental leap away from LLMs to some other fundamental AI technology, there doesn’t appear to be any way to automate geist.”
This forms the crux of Paper Moose’s thesis about the future. While much of the industry will be automated in the coming years, Hunter believes the generation of great creative ideas will not be one of them. However, he warns that automation will still heavily impact the creative sector, particularly through the rise of low-quality output: “Indeed, the rise of slop creative threatens to drown us all in an avalanche of low quality creative. Which is why we built Moose Review.”
Moose Review is described as an AI creative testing tool that assesses the quality of creative against a framework derived from marketing science research predicting advertising effectiveness. The framework draws on the work of leading practitioners including Byron Sharp, Les Binet and Peter Field, Karen Nelson-Field, Orlando Wood and Daniel Kahneman.
Hunter explains that Moose Review works by polling ‘Synths’-synthetic focus groups-and running them through a series of tuned questions: “The Synth responses closely mirror real human subgroups by up to 94%, while removing all the problematic components of human testing and allowing for unparalleled speed. With over 20,000 reviews and counting in the Moose Review library, we are finding the results staggeringly close to that of traditional focus groups, at a fraction of the cost and time required by traditional methods.”
He adds that the tool introduces something new to the creative process: measurable outputs combined with rapid feedback: “Moose Review gives us what creativity has never had before: a verifiable output with a quick feedback loop. We think this is the perfect synthesis of geist + intelligence – way to test early concepts before production spend, and finished assets before media commitment. It lets us kill weak ideas cheaply and confirm strong ones confidently, ensuring every dollar spent outperforms.”
Paper Moose says this type of augmentation-combining traditional agency functions with emerging technology-will continue to shape the industry for the foreseeable future.
As part of this approach, the agency has also been developing its own internal software platform, designed to handle all business operations including scheduling, documentation, financial tracking, research and media implementation.
Says Hunter: “We call this super app Portal and you can think of it as a foundation for automating agency intelligence work, freeing up capacity to apply more geist thinking across our clients’ business.”
When combined with in-house production capabilities-both generative and traditional-and media expertise, the agency says this enables greater speed and quality, resulting in a leaner and more efficient operating model.
Looking ahead, Hunter believes the future of agencies will be built on a balance between human creativity and automated intelligence: “Our bet is that the future of our business and others like it will be built on humans focused on geist tasks supported by a near full automation of intelligence. But just like AI won’t replace the physical trades, AI will not replace creative agencies – but it will force them to become leaner, faster, wilder.
“The next fifteen years belong to those willing to dramatically alter their business models to balance the automateable and the ineffable.”
Pictured (L-R): Josh Flowers and Nick Hunter, Co-Founders, Paper Moose
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