Dollar Shave Club already makes 90% of its advertising in-house. Its new brand boss wants AI to close the rest of the gap.“We are 90% in-house,” said Dollar Shave Club’s chief brand and innovation officer Laura Higgins, when asked how much of the brand’s advertising is done internally. Asked if that figure could climb further as AI becomes more embedded in how her team works, she said: “I hope so.”
It’s not because she believes agencies are heading for extinction. On the contrary, the former Procter & Gamble marketer thinks they still have plenty to offer — just less for a challenger brand of Dollar Shave Club’s size that leans on being nimble and fast rather than farming out its “irreverent” voice. AI, in her telling, just compounds that advantage.
“Because human production is really expensive, especially for us as challenger brands,” said Higgins. “We have to lean into these tools that make things less expensive and faster, so that we have money left over for the human shots, where we’re able to lean into the actual people and the actual production.”
Take the brand’s 4th of July campaign. Higgins wrote the brief herself — a parallel between the American colonists’ revolt 250 years ago and Dollar Shave Club’s own founding swipe at corporate malaise in 2012. From there, her small in-house team of copywriters, comedians, conceptors and marketers, using Claude and the AI video tool Higgsfield, turned that idea into ads like an eagle chasing a hot dog or a cartoonish riff on Washington crossing the Delaware. The brief to first draft took two to three days. A finished 30-second cut took about a week. The whole campaign, multiple asset sizes included, was live within a month.
