About a year ago, we published our first post. It was about AI — because of course it was — and whether it was going to replace us. Twelve months and twenty-seven posts later, we’re still here. So is AI. The question just got more interesting.
This is a look back at one year of saying what nobody else would: what happens when you start writing publicly about a craft that, for reasons we still find baffling, almost nobody talks about.
How We Got Here
One of my earliest memories is being a toddler on a film set, jumping over the huge thick cables on the floor while my mum watched one of my dad’s winning bids go into production. He was an EP. The advertising industry wasn’t something I discovered; it had just always been there, ever since I was born.
Fast forward some good 20 years, I graduated from journalism school and switched to advertising fairly quickly, but the instinct to tell stories about the process — to document the inside of things — never left. I was deeply inspired by Picture, Lilian Ross’s account of the making of John Huston’s The Red Badge of Courage. That book showed me that the story of how something gets made is often more revealing than the thing itself.
I suppose it’s unusual to be in the treatments business for as long as I have.
Most people in this business see it as a transitional state — something you do on your way to becoming a director, but I’ve never seen it that way. Treatment-making is a well-rounded career in its own right: writing, editing, visual research, graphic design. There’s already plenty of knowledge required to be good at each of those things. I couldn’t see how you could, in practical terms, do all of that and develop the entirely separate skill set that directing demands.
So the blog didn’t start because we saw a gap in the market. It started because this is a fun, dynamic job that most people don’t even know exists, and we thought it might be useful to talk about it. Whether for people starting out on this path and for directors who don’t love or don’t fully understand what makes a treatment land, or for creatives and EPs who want to keep up with how the pitch landscape is shifting.
What We Planned vs. What Actually Happened
Looking back, the blog moved through four distinct phases; none of which we planned.
Phase 1: The Craft Posts (February–April 2025)
We opened with practical material. How to win a treatment. How to choose a crew. When to use GIFs versus film frames. This was about establishing credibility and showing we knew the work from inside out.
Phase 2: The Bigger Questions (May–July 2025)
Something shifted around May. We started writing about things that made us uncomfortable: who should be paying for treatments, whether visual researchers deserve credit, what “taste” actually means when everyone claims to have it. These leaned towards argumentative posts more than classic how-to posts.
Phase 3: Fewer Posts, More Weight (August–December 2025)
We slowed down. Partly because we were busy with actual treatments, partly because the posts were getting denser. The one about lowering our visual research rates was the most exposed we’d been: publicly recalibrating our own pricing in response to AI-accelerated workflows. The year-end review forced us to articulate what we’d been observing in fragments all year.
Phase 4: The Psychology Turn (January–March 2026)
This is where the blog became something we hadn’t expected. We stopped writing about how to make treatments and started writing about how decision-makers process them. But we like to keep things mixed, so the idea going forward is to have variety, just as it has been.
Here’s what we learned from the analytics:
The AI posts performed best. The Veo 3 experiment, the Sora 2 assessment… People want to know about the latest tools. We get it, as the pace of change creates genuine urgency.
But we think the deeper posts — how agencies actually read your treatment, what makes something land beyond aesthetics — are more valuable precisely because they don’t expire. Software changes every other week, and there are endless ways to make your setup work for you. The deeper ins and outs of the industry are something rarer to come across.
The Posts That Stayed With Us
Twenty-seven posts in, a few stand out:
“The History of the Commercial Treatment” is a personal favourite. The blog gave me an excuse — or rather, a reason — to dive into the history of this thing I’ve dedicated over a decade of my life to. And it doesn’t disappoint. The history of the commercial treatment is rich, genuinely fascinating, and stretches back a hundred years to the studio system era. Knowing where this craft comes from changes how you think about where it’s going.
“Who Should Be Paying for the Treatment?” landed well on Instagram and sparked real conversation. It’s a hot topic and one that remains unresolved. Everyone wants to see a preview of the film through a well-made treatment — the client, the agency, the production company — but none of them really want to pay for the material. We think that’s one of the many reasons invoices tend to be delayed in this part of the industry. The post puts numbers to what everyone feels but nobody quantifies.
What We’d Revisit
If we could give one post a second life, it would be “How Much Does a Treatment Cost?”
It was, frankly, underlooked. Which is a shame, because it brings real transparency to a conversation the industry avoids: actual numbers, actual breakdowns, the economics of speculative creative work that most people pretend don’t exist. We’d like to revisit it with fresh data and more context. Some posts deserve a second run at the right moment.
The Thing Nobody Tells You About Writing in a Niche Nobody Writes About
The reaction we get most often isn’t pushback. It’s something closer to relief. “Oh yeah — why not? Why is it that nobody talked about this before? Why is it kept so secret?”
People understand perfectly well that directors direct teams. An art director comes up with ideas; a cinematographer shapes the image; a production designer builds the world. Nobody finds that controversial. But somehow, at the treatment stage, it becomes taboo to acknowledge that not all the ideas on the page belong solely to the director.
Making a film is a collaborative business from start to finish, and it shouldn’t be a big deal to acknowledge that.
At Ghost, we’ve never taken pride or interest in claiming creative ideas as our own. What we claim authorship of is the quality of the research, the layout, the writing.
And yet, the fact that saying this out loud still feels notable tells you everything about why this blog needed to exist.
Year Two
Twenty-seven posts gave us a body of work. Year two is about building a readership.
We’d love it if this blog grew into something you subscribe to — posts arriving in your inbox because you’ve decided the thinking here is worth keeping up with. That’s the kind of relationship we value ourselves: when we find a brand or a voice doing genuinely useful work, we subscribe. We want to stay in the loop. We hope some of you feel that way about what we’re doing here.
In the coming months, we’ll be going deeper on client psychology, the economics of pitch culture, and the evolving relationship between AI tools and human editorial judgment. We have strong opinions on all of it.
If there’s a topic you want us to tackle — something the industry won’t say out loud, something you’ve been wondering about — tell us. The whole point of this blog is to say the things that don’t get said.
Here’s to year two of saying what nobody else would.
What Next? If this resonates with you, we’ll be sharing more deep dives into the craft of treatment writing and design. Let us know if there’s a topic you’d like us to explore next.
Get in touch:
- Website: www.treatmentsbyghost.com
- Email: info@treatmentsbyghost.com
- Instagram: @ghost_treatments