This AI platform helps you work with famous ad creatives—or at least their avatars

Originally published in Ad Age

A new tech platform called Ad Legends is betting that AI can replicate the thinking of advertising’s celebrated creatives. Is it a gimmick or a sign of where the industry is heading?

Started in January, Ad Legends states that it already has hundreds of clients, which include agencies and brands that pay for personas on a monthly basis—and it gives them the ability to customize with their own staff. The company was co-founded by Vince Cook and twin brothers Steve and Dave Metcalf, who named a few clients, including telecom company Cellcom and nonprofit GlamourGals. Clients also range from AI startups to small businesses and agencies.

Ad Legends is an AI platform that lets brands and agencies “hire” the digital personas of famous advertising creatives to help generate ideas. The company is self-labeled as “the first fully functional AI-powered advertising agency,” however, it operates more like a SaaS company and agency hybrid.

Each “legend” is modeled after a real, living ad veteran whose creative style, past work and philosophy are built into an AI agent that can brainstorm, write and concept like they would.

Clients can pick which legends they want to “collaborate” with on briefs, and each real-life legend earns royalties based on how often their persona is used. The goal, the founders say, is to give companies instant access to top-tier creative thinking—without needing to actually hire the legend or their agency.

“We have the ability to create private legends,” said Steve Metcalf, co-founder, CEO and chief AI officer of the company. “If an agency brings on Ad Legends and would like to augment that with their own team, we give them the same tools to immortalize their own people,” said co-founder and Co-Chief Creative Officer Dave Metcalf.

Prior to starting Ad Legends, Dave Metcalf was a creative with Ogilvy for over 20 years, most recently as a global executive creative director. Steve Metcalf, who is also the co-founder, CEO and chief AI officer of the AI conference Imagine AI Live, previously held several tech, marketing and product roles. He was most recently the chief product officer, digital services for Barry-Wehmiller, a global supplier of manufacturing technology and services.

Beyond the platform, the company also operates as an agency with strategy, creative and production teams.

The company’s legend roster includes executives such as Janet Champ, one of the first female writers to work at Wieden+Kennedy, known for Nike work in the ’90s; Rick Boyko, a former co-president and CCO of Ogilvy North America; Cheryl Berman, a longtime CCO for Leo Burnett; and Donna Weinheim, a former partner at Cliff Freeman & Partners who created the iconic “Where’s the Beef?” campaign for Wendy’s and later became an executive creative director at BBDO.

Ad legends are identified through an AI agent that the team has built, but there is also a human judgment component to signing up the talent.

“It’s subjective … kinda. And kinda not,” said Jimmy Smith, founder and CCO of Amusement Park Entertainment and one of the legends on the platform. “You know who [the legends] are. Just like you know who the greatest guitar players of all time are. Has their work in the industry influenced culture? Did their work alter the trajectory of a brand?”

Other factors, such as consistency and how peers view the person, are a factor, according to Smith, who added that a few executives were exempted from the platform because their holding companies wouldn’t allow it.

What sets Ad Legends apart from generic AI tools, its founders said, is its process. “One of the things we do is we have a curation process,” Steve Metcalf said. The system “will look at everything [a legend] has ever done.”

The legends themselves own their avatars and can remove projects they don’t want considered. “It’s not just the work we’ve done,” Smith added. “It’s our interviews, books, even college textbooks. It takes all of that and scrapes it up and puts it into this personality.”

The company also interviews the legends and provides them with prompts to answer, giving the personas a more authentic feel.

Currently, there are 10 legends listed on the site with five more to come in the next few weeks, said Vince Cook, co-founder and co-CCO of Ad Legends.

“We have slightly different arrangements with each legend,” said Steve Metcalf. “We have kind of like a Spotify model to pay out royalties … so their lifetime of work will now go to work for them on their behalf.”

Ad Legends isn’t the first instance of AI personas or synthetic audiences being created. Agencies, holding companies and brands have been investing in these types of products through internal or external means, especially as more brands look to become more self-sufficient.

Lindsey Slaby, founder of consultancy Sunday Dinner said the Ad Legends model is similar to another company called Motion, which creates AI creative strategists for clients.

Motion also creates AI creative strategists to be purchased on a monthly basis. “Ad Legends is an interesting provocation—an AI agency that claims to bottle the ‘digital DNA’ of great creatives,” she said. “The idea of encoding creative intuition into an agent is seductive—a kind of instant Mad Men-meets-machine.

“What’s missing is clarity on that workflow,” Slaby said. “Does it connect to live brand data? Does it feed back into performance metrics? Or is it simply a closed-loop sandbox? Without that understanding, it’s hard to tell whether this is a true creative operating system or just a polished front-end ideation tool.”

“Ad Legends is far more than a simple ideation tool,” responded Dave Metcalf. “It’s a creative operating system built on three layers: creative DNA, brand intelligence and campaign execution. The platform already integrates first-party brand data (provided directly by brands on our platform) and agentic research to ensure every idea is grounded in real strategy.”

Others believe tools like this prove even more that agency brands are becoming less relevant.

“Who knows (or cares) if this is going to be a successful business, but it is brilliant at making a highly relevant and important point today, of which we all need to be reminded: Great people (especially legends) make the difference,” said Tom Denford, founder of consultancy ID Comms. “In advertising, creativity gives brands a competitive advantage. That creativity comes not from the agency logo above the door but from the people (and legends) behind the door.”