What happened:
Silverside, the AI innovation lab spun out of agency Pereira O'Dell, used open-source tool ComfyUI to produce SVEDKA vodka's "Shake Your Bots Off", a 30-second spot that aired during Super Bowl LX in February.
Per AdWeek, the team choreographed the spot's robot dance "in a matter of hours" and was making significant changes a week before launch.
Silverside co-founder PJ Pereira compares ComfyUI's node-based workflow to the arrival of Photoshop layers, predicting "everyone" will work this way in a year or two.
Zoom out: ComfyUI raised $30 million at a $500 million valuation in April, led by Craft Ventures, to scale its open-source node-based workflow for creative production. The tool takes a different approach from text-to-video models like OpenAI's Sora, Google's Veo, and Runway, which generate a finished video from a prompt. ComfyUI users assemble the steps themselves and can adjust one node without rerunning the whole graph, which is what made it viable for production-grade work on a Super Bowl spot.
What he's saying: For Pereira, ComfyUI's node graph is a new creative literacy on the scale of Photoshop's introduction of layers in the 1990s.
"The idea of building and structuring a workflow is going to do that again," he said in a video produced with ComfyUI. He calls it "a different type of creativity, a creativity that sits at this kind of process-level thinking," and predicts it will be "the way that everyone thinks in a year or two from now."
Yes, but: Working in nodes is its own discipline. Designing, debugging, and handing off complex graphs takes practice that even experienced creative teams are still building, which is why production-grade work today often runs through specialist shops like Silverside.
Looking ahead: ComfyUI's $30 million Series A signals investor appetite for workflow-based AI tools alongside the prompt-based generators that have dominated headlines.