Paper Moose is a fiercely independent, B Corp certified creative, production, and media agency based in Surry Hills, Sydney, and founded in 2011 by a group of filmmakers and artists. A lot has happened in fifteen years. The agency has evolved from a production company into a fully integrated creative agency. How advertising is done has changed.

There is no doubt the next 15 years are going to be even wilder. Paper Moose looks back a little … and looks forward a lot. Here’s its story of getting older and Moosier, geist, Moose Review, and balancing the automate-able and the ineffable.

“We 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 us from a filmmaker collective into a full-service agency, and now in 2026, we find ourselves facing the far larger AI automation wave.

“The question is no longer whether AI will dramatically transform our industry. In what appears to now be the industrial revolution for knowledge work, the question is what will be left for the humans to do?

“We talk 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.AI excels at anything that can be tracked via a benchmark and optimised through reinforcement learning. You can train a model to play chess because there is a verifiable outcome: win or lose. 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 is the crux of our thesis about the future. A lot in our industry will be automated over the next few years, but the generation of great creative ideas is not one of them. But that’s not to say that automation won’t heavily affect the creative industry. 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 an AI creative testing tool that assesses the quality of creative against a framework derived from marketing science research that predicts advertising effectiveness. The dimensions in the Moose Review framework come from the work of leading marketing science practitioners including Byron Sharp on mental and physical availability, Les Binet and Peter Field, on emotional brand advertising and long-term growth, Karen Nelson-Field on attention economics, Orlando Wood on right-brain creative performance and Daniel Kahneman on System 1 processing, just to name a few.

Moose Review works by polling ‘Synths’ or synthetic focus groups and running them through a battery 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. 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. This augmentation of traditional agency functions with cutting edge technology will continue to shape our industry for the foreseeable future.

“We have been building our own custom internal agency software handling every business operation – tying in all the raw intelligence of our craft into one place – scheduling, documentation, chat, financial tracking, strategic research, media implementation.

“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 we pair this with our in-house production (generative and traditional) and media capabilities it allows us unparalleled speed and quality. The result is a leaner, faster, better operating model. 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 automate-able and the ineffable.”

Cover image l-r: Joshua Flowers (Invention Chief) & Nick Hunter (CEO & ECD)