Henry Coan puts the cost of a conventional short-form shoot, with a rented set, paid actors, makeup, and a production team, at about $5,000, and the AI-generated version at about $5. What stays expensive, in his view, is knowing what to make. Henry has built his new agency, Interrupt Studios, on that premise.

“Ideas that are really good become so much more valuable,” Henry says. “You now have the permission to not play it safe, because everything’s so cheap.” He founded Interrupt Studios in Charlotte, North Carolina, in January 2026 to help brands and creators make short-form videos that go viral, on the premise that many marketing agencies have failed to hire people with an instinct for what spreads.

That instinct is the product. When anyone can make content, Henry argues, attention gets harder to win, and companies need someone who can tell what will earn it. “That gut feeling is maybe the hottest thing on the market,” he says. 

Henry arrives at the agency from content work, including more than two years as a ghostwriter and content marketer at Workweek, where he wrote a newsletter for over 102,000 marketers, and a growth role at the tech show “TBPN.” His case study is an AI-generated Napoleon he says changed his own mind about AI video, which he used to dismiss as slop.

Cheap Video Opens the Door to Stranger Content

The change Henry describes starts with realism. AI video has moved from obvious slop, such as a clip of Will Smith eating spaghetti, to footage realistic enough to work as a medium, he notes. With the cost drop, that puts high-end production within reach of people who could never hire a crew.

“It really does democratize this access to really high-quality video,” Henry says, despite disliking the word as overused. “I think it also could unlock a time where we have the best content ever.”

He also expects the output to get odd. Characters like Jean Phil, the AI-generated Frenchman, would once have required hours in a makeup chair. “Now it’s just a click away, and when people are given the option to be weird, they usually choose it,” Henry says.

The same economics threaten some human creators. Where Lil Miquela took a ton of work to build, Henry expects anyone with a Higgsfield subscription and a laptop to produce lifestyle influencers tailored to what audiences want. “It’s going to be a bit of an arms race. I would hate to be in UGC right now,” he says. 

His Napoleon account is his attempt to show what wins in that race.

A Napoleon Account Doubles as the Agency’s Pitch

Jean Phil was the trigger. Watching those videos, Henry, who has long admired Napoleon, realized he could build a character with no actor and no production costs. Napoleon offered “tons of historical context you can pull from and make jokes about,” he says.

Henry created an account called OG Short King. His first video recast the years-old Bagel Boss freak-out with Napoleon raging about women not liking him. He expected maybe 100,000 views. “I woke up the next day, I had a million views on the video,” he says. Commenters often praise the costume. “It’s not a costume, man. It’s actually AI,” Henry says.

He has turned down crypto meme coin promoters, casinos and product sellers. “This page is really just a case study for what my agency does and our taste in virality,” he says.

The refusal also frames his read on why many AI accounts stall. Creators who start with money in mind, he argues, ask how to fully automate the videos and put in the least effort, a pattern he sees in meme coin characters. “Your goal should be to entertain people and not to automate attention away,” Henry says. “It takes effort, and it takes the right incentives.”

Taste Separates Slop From What Spreads

Effort, in Henry’s telling, comes down to taste, whatever the tool. His client research on YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels and TikTok turns up plenty of slop made without AI. “There was already slop, but we just didn’t know what to call it. We called it low taste,” he says. What separates good work is “taste, effort and writing,” in his words.

On his own account, taste works as a filter. Followers send him video ideas, and he says nine times out of 10 the answer is no because the concept doesn’t fit the character. An AI account built around King Henry makes fantastic content, he says, but lacks a cohesive narrative. “Everything I do, I want to make sure it ties back to Napoleon in some way,” Henry says.

Narrative is also why, in his view, audiences forgive the AI. “If you can make people laugh hard enough, they really don’t care where the video was made,” he says. He expects resistance to fade as people with high taste make better AI video.

Virality Formulas Fail Without Instinct

Taste, for Henry, is a gut call, which puts him at odds with coaches who teach virality as a formula of pattern-interrupt hooks and curiosity loops. He calls them “the formula crowd” and argues AI video will prove them even more wrong, because a copied concept stops working once it is no longer novel. “The only score is the views,” he says of products that claim to predict virality.

His alternative is to watch what the algorithm promotes, usually humor or games, put a personal spin on the concept, post plenty that probably won’t work, and double down on what does. A prospective client recently told him his videos get very few views. “The algorithm’s clearly saying to you that your videos aren’t good. So whatever you’re doing, just don’t do it anymore,” Henry says.

The rest he credits to what he calls “the sensationalist gene,” an instinct he sees in creators, musicians and news editors. He cites an account he read of art experts who spotted near-perfect counterfeits instantly but talked themselves out of the right answer when asked to explain. One of his Napoleon videos sits at about 20,000 views, which he says he expected before posting. “Every video I’ve had go viral was not a shock to me,” he says.

Paid Media Is the First Opening for Brands

Brands are where Henry plans to sell that instinct. He has seen brands launch their own AI creator pages and says they usually fail because the approach is too obvious. He expects the bigger change in paid media, where brands can test dozens of ad variations, including unconventional ideas they might previously have rejected, without hiring UGC actors or production crews.

In organic content, Henry recommends using AI sparingly, for shots a team couldn’t get on set or in ways that aren’t obvious, because a cohort of viewers remains firmly opposed to AI video. He is clear that he is not advising deception. “There’s no reason to alienate people on purpose,” he says.

His sales approach runs on the same premise. Where other salespeople offer a $100 gift card or a Ninja CREAMi for a meeting, Henry offers free ideas. “It’s never been a better time to be an idea guy who has the instinct,” he says. He grounds the conviction in David Ogilvy’s belief that every campaign needs a big idea. “I don’t think that type of truth is ever going to be proven wrong,” Henry says.

Henry Expects the Feed to Split in Two

Over the next two years, Henry expects content to polarize. The feed today, as he describes it, holds a little great content, a little horrible content and a large middle of okay content. He predicts far more at both ends as people who lacked the tools or skills gain them, and less in the middle.

That split follows from the rest of his argument. If production is cheap, what decides which end a video lands on is the idea and the judgment behind it, and every time Henry has used AI to generate ideas, he says, the results were “meh.” His prescription is balance, with AI tools making the video easier to produce and the human gut deciding what is worth making.

“Scrolling on your phone is going to be a battle between ‘I hate that’ versus ‘I love it,’” Henry says.

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