Dollar Shave Club Calls A $400 Campaign The Best In Its History. Unilever And Coca-Cola Are Chasing The Same Economics.

Dollar Shave Club built its name in 2012 on a YouTube video that cost $4,000 and drew millions of views. On July 1, the brand launched a campaign that cost $400, and the company says it has become the most successful in its history.

Chief Brand and Innovation Officer Laura Higgins, who joined the company two months ago and has overseen three ad rollouts since, described the production model behind that figure in an interview with Retail Dive published July 14. The campaign, “250 Years. No BS. Still Free,” was created entirely in-house. Higgins briefed the concept, the internal team spent three days developing it with AI tools, additional elements were built with tools including Higgsfield and Claude, and the work was essentially finished within a week. The 30-second spot places Dollar Shave Club, along with competitors Gillette and Harry’s, inside Revolutionary War paintings, a gag that maps the era’s tax revolt onto the modern shopper’s suspicion of padded pricing and surprise charges. Higgins said the accompanying $2.50 starter kit drew shoppers in and that buyers went on to purchase well beyond the entry offer. “It allows the creatives to be creative,” she said of the AI-driven process.

A second AI-built campaign followed on July 14. “Danglers,” supporting the brand’s Ball Spray product, is anchored by a 15-second hero video in which a set of truck nuts plays the role of the anatomy in question. Higgins said the concept’s speed and cost would be impractical with human actors and conventional production, and that AI lets the brand render an exaggerated visual joke consumers immediately read as a joke.

The economics are already reshaping the brand’s agency relationships. Too Short For Modeling, the shop that created some of Dollar Shave Club’s earlier AI work and initially briefed the Danglers assignment, will keep getting work from the brand, Higgins said in the interview, but probably less of it now that her team has demonstrated what it can produce internally. That expectation tracks with survey data Adweek published in March from research firm NewtonX, which found 32 percent of brands expect to handle nearly all creative in-house within 12 months, with another 23 percent expecting to bring at least half of their creative work inside over the same period.

Bigger Advertisers Got There First, With Bigger Budgets

Dollar Shave Club is the smallest and fastest example of a shift the category’s largest advertisers have been building toward for two years, each along a different path. Coca-Cola released AI-generated versions of its “Holidays Are Coming” campaign in November 2025 for the second consecutive year, produced with external studios Secret Level and Silverside AI, and the company describes its prior-year spot as the first fully generative film to run on broadcast. Behind-the-scenes material from the 2025 production, covered by Today, said a team of five specialists generated and refined more than 70,000 video clips in 30 days. Forbes, citing The Wall Street Journal, reported the company declined to comment on what the holiday campaign cost.

Unilever has taken the infrastructure route. The company says its digital twin technology, which generates product imagery from physics-accurate 3D models, cut imagery production time and cost roughly in half, and it has cited an 87 percent reduction in content production costs at TRESemmé in Thailand. It also operates in-house design studios, under the name Sketch Pro, embedded directly in brand teams to select and apply AI tools.

Mondelez has built a third model, keeping its agencies inside the build. The Oreo and Cadbury maker has invested more than $40 million in a proprietary generative AI content platform called AIDA, developed with Accenture and Publicis Groupe, and is targeting a 30 to 50 percent reduction in content production costs. Jon Halvorson, the company’s global senior vice president of consumer experience, told Reuters that conventional animation costs run into the hundreds of thousands per spot, while “this type of set-up is orders of magnitude smaller.” The company expects its first AI-generated TV ads to air this holiday season, with a possible 2027 Super Bowl spot, and Reuters reported the company planned to begin using the tool in November 2025 to build Oreo product pages on Amazon and Walmart, extending the technology beyond brand advertising and into commerce content.

There is a wrinkle in the lineage. Retail Dive reported that Dollar Shave Club’s original irreverent voice was subdued during its years under Unilever, which bought the brand in 2016 and sold a 65 percent majority stake to Nexus Capital Management in 2023, retaining 35 percent. The former parent and its former subsidiary now operate parallel AI content programs at opposite ends of the investment scale.

What The Shift Means Depends On Who Is Buying The Creative

The cost side of the model is well documented. The reception side is contested. Coca-Cola’s AI holiday ads drew visible consumer criticism in both 2024 and 2025, with coverage in Today and Forbes cataloging social media reactions that ranged from disappointment to calls for boycotts, much of it centered on the uncanny quality of AI-rendered people and the perceived threat to creative workers. Mondelez, per Reuters, is not yet putting human likenesses in its AI-generated content, and Dollar Shave Club’s truck-nuts conceit avoids human likenesses altogether. The pattern across all three suggests the brands moving fastest are the ones whose creative concepts do not depend on convincing synthetic humans, though that reading is an inference from the examples, not a stated strategy from any of the companies.

The operational read differs by scale. For large CPG advertisers, the Coca-Cola, Unilever, and Mondelez examples describe capital projects, with brand-safety guardrails, approved training repositories, and platform builds that take quarters and eight-figure budgets to stand up. For challenger and DTC brands, the Dollar Shave Club case suggests the entry cost is now a strong brief and a small team fluent in the tools. Mondelez’s agency-partnered platform marks out a middle path for brands that want ownership of the system without building it alone. The implication for mid-market brands weighing those options is that the build-versus-buy calculus on creative production has moved, and agency retainers priced on production hours are the line item under the most direct pressure.

The agency side of that equation is adapting under strain. Forrester’s June report with the 4As, The State Of AI Inside US Marketing Agencies, 2026, found nine in 10 US agencies now use generative AI and half use agentic AI in marketing execution, while warning that the industry’s focus on productivity and cost efficiency risks eroding creativity and long-term brand growth. Dollar Shave Club will offer a live test of whether the low-cost model holds at bigger scope when it launches a brand-level platform campaign pulling its full product line together around October.

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