Philip Ho on Absurd's AI ad agency: 300K average organic views, 90%+ margins, and Super Bowl ambitions

Summary

Philip Ho, CEO of Absurd, is building what he describes as an AI-native creative ad agency — not a self-serve editor, not a foundation model, but a full-service shop that takes a brief and delivers a finished video. The pitch is that the agency model lets Absurd charge exponentially more than a SaaS tool would.

The number that anchors the business is 300,000 average organic views per video, across every client regardless of their existing audience size. Absurd's most-cited example is a Kalshi ad depicting Mamdani versus Cuomo in a one-on-one basketball match, timed to the New York City mayoral race. Ho says every video they've posted has gone viral.

Pricing and margins

Absurd charges $30,000 to $40,000 per launch video — comparable to a full-day production shoot. Model costs for a 30-to-60-second video run $30 to $100, giving the company gross margins above 90% even after including human labor, and close to 98% on a pure model-cost basis. Ho says the team turned down $200,000 in revenue over three days because of a throughput bottleneck they hadn't yet resolved.

The business is moving toward retainers. Absurd is striking bundle deals — cited clients include Replit and Warp — for 10 videos a month, scaling toward 50, 100, and eventually 200. The longer-term plan is to connect an orchestration layer directly to clients' ad metrics dashboards, compounding performance data over time to improve targeting and creative iteration. Ho argues that AI video fundamentally changes the economics of ad testing: a single concept can generate a thousand variations with one prompt change, making large-scale multivariate testing feasible for the first time.

Throughput trajectory

Three weeks before the interview, Absurd was producing one video per person per week. At the time of speaking, the figure was 10 Super Bowl-quality ads per person per week, made in parallel. Ho says the target for the following week is 50, and the week after that, 1,000. One unnamed company had already requested 1,500 Kalshi-style Super Bowl ads in a month.

Model stack and workflow

Absurd runs an internal orchestration layer that selects models by use case across Kling, Wan, Minimax, and Runway, informed by a 50-page internal document of model-specific learnings. Ho gives a concrete example of pre-Minimax Pro workflow: to swap a face, the team would instruct the model to first remove the original head, then composite the target face onto the headless image — a workaround that illustrates how much proprietary process sits between the raw models and the finished output.

Team and funding

Absurd is three people — Ho and co-founders Daniel and Damon. The company closed a funding round approximately a week and a half before the interview; Ho declined to disclose the amount. When asked about Super Bowl commercials, he declined to confirm or deny any active deals with Super Bowl advertisers.