Have You Seen Sora?

Alrighty, settle in. This is getting a little crazy. Today, we're tackling one of the most significant and rapidly evolving applications in the AI space: OpenAI's Sora.

Many of you probably first heard about Sora when it was announced in early 2024, with those mind-blowing, realistic videos that broke the internet. Back then, it was just a simple research preview. As of today, in late 2025, Sora is no longer just a concept—it's an active, publicly available application that is already changing how we think about content creation. Especially video.

Let's break down what it is, how it's being used, and—most importantly for this discussion—how businesses can leverage tools like this for a marketing advantage.

Easy and addictive, Sora is just a glimpse of what’s to come.

1. What is Sora?

At its simplest, Sora is a text-to-video AI model. You provide a text prompt, and the model generates a video clip from scratch.

However, its capabilities have expanded significantly. The current version, Sora 2, which rolled out in September, isn't just about text. You can also:

• Animate Static Images: Give it a still photo, and it will bring it to life.

• Use "Cameos": This is a huge feature. You can upload a short video of yourself to "verify" your likeness, and then "cast" yourself in any video you generate.

• Generate Sound: Sora 2 now generates synchronized sound effects, ambient audio, and even simple dialogue that matches the scene.

• Use the App: It's not just a tool for developers. Sora is now a mobile app on iOS and Android with a TikTok-style social feed, meaning millions of people are generating and sharing this content right now.

2. How is it Used? (The General Angle)

On a personal and creative level, people are using it for everything:

• Creating short, imaginative films and animations.

• Visualizing dreams or stories.

• Making unique social media content and memes.

• Using the "Cameo" feature to create videos of themselves in fantastical scenarios.

But let's pivot to the professional side, because that's where the disruption is truly happening.

3. The Business Angle: From Prompt to Production

This is the core of our lesson today. Sora is radically lowering the barrier to entry for high-quality video production. What used to require a film crew, a location, actors, and an editing bay can now be approximated in minutes by a marketing manager with a good prompt.

Here are the primary business use cases we're seeing emerge:

1. Marketing and Advertising (The 800-lb Gorilla)

This is the most obvious and impactful area.

• Rapid Content Generation: A marketing team can generate dozens of video variations for a social media campaign (TikTok, Instagram Reels, etc.) in a single afternoon, skipping the storyboard process altogether. They can test different styles, characters, and settings to see what performs best in real time.

• Hyper-Personalization: Imagine an e-commerce brand sending you a video ad that doesn't just show a generic model, but shows its new product being used in your city, or even in a style that matches your browsing history, or clothing and apparal right on your body in various scenarios.

• A/B Testing Visuals: Instead of two or three video ads for a campaign, a company can now test 50. “Does the blue sweater sell better than the red one?” Let's generate both and find out in an hour, not a week.

• Seasonal Content: Need a "Happy Holidays" video for your brand? Or a "Summer Sale" promo? You can create a high-quality, unique video instantly, as opposed to relying on stale stock footage.

2. E-commerce and Product Visualization

This is a game-changer for online stores.

• Product Demos: Instead of just static photos, a company can generate videos of its product in use. "A 360-degree view of a new running shoe, with studio lighting," or "a video of a backpack being used on a rainy hiking trail."

• "Lifestyle" Shots: Sellers can place their products in any imaginable scenario to appeal to their target demographic, without the cost of a lifestyle photoshoot.

3. Creative Prototyping

This is for the creative industries—film, gaming, and architecture.

• Visual Storyboarding: A film director can type a scene from their script and get an animated storyboard, complete with camera angles and motion, to show their team.

• Game Development: A game designer can generate quick cutscenes or visualize character movements to prototype ideas before committing expensive developer resources.

• Architectural Visualization: An architect can generate a "video walkthrough" of a building that doesn't exist yet, simply from a rendering or a detailed description.

4. Corporate and Educational Content

• Training & Simulations: Companies can create custom video-based training modules ("a video showing the correct way to lift a heavy box in a warehouse") without hiring actors.

• Explainer Videos: Need to explain a complex scientific concept or a new software feature? Sora can visualize it.

Oh Wait, there’s a "But..." (Current Limitations)

It's crucial to understand it's not magic (yet). As of today, the business use of Sora has a few practical constraints:

• Cost: After an initial "free" period, OpenAI is now rolling out monetization. The free app limits you to about 30 video generations per day. Pro plans offer more, but companies are now paying for "generation packs." The "free-for-all" is ending.

• Length: The videos are still short. Most clips are 10-25 seconds. You can "stitch" them together in the app to make a video up to 60 seconds long, but you aren't creating a 30-minute episode of a show.

• Watermarks: Free-tier videos have a visible, moving watermark. To get a clean video for a professional ad, you have to pay for the Pro subscription.

• Control: While Sora 2 is much better, it can still struggle with complex physics, specific left/right instructions, and maintaining perfect character consistency across multiple "stitched" clips.

Summary

Sora has transitioned from a tech demo to a mass-market creative tool and a disruptive business application. It is democratizing video production, enabling small businesses to create content previously reserved for large corporations, and forcing large corporations to rethink their entire marketing and content pipelines.

The central business angle is speed and cost-efficiency: it enables the high-volume, highly customized creation of video assets at a fraction of the traditional production cost.

Would you like to brainstorm some examples? Just ask. As of this writing, the Sora app is invite-only, and we are happy to share from our pool of invites.