Pareto 20, No. 20: Mike Futia, for making your own video ads at a known cost per second

He tests AI video models by making an actual ad with them and says what each second cost. The last seat on the list, the most perishable, and the one with the most to disclose.

Seat 20 on The Pareto 20 is Mike Futia, and it holds the seat for the most specific job on the list: producing short video ads for your own products without a crew, and knowing what each one costs before you make ten of them.

Who he is

Futia is a Connecticut founder whose LinkedIn history shows about a decade in pharmaceutical compliance and privacy before a move into digital business, first with an SEO training brand he started in 2018 and, since 2025, with two communities on Skool: a free one for AI automation past 20,000 members and a paid one, SCALE AI, for AI-generated video ads. He publishes near-daily on LinkedIn and periodically on YouTube. His stated audience is "DTC brands and agencies who need more creative, faster."

What to read him for

A model test that is also a real ad. Is Gemini Omni the Best AI Model for UGC Ads? (May 21, 2026) builds a multi-clip ad for a supplement in Google's video tool and again in Seedance, and reports his on-screen costs: roughly 6 to 10 cents per second on Google against 14 to 24 cents per second on Seedance through fal.ai. "Google is three to four times cheaper," he concludes, and lower quality. He also hits a limit and says so: "I did try that in Google but the MP3 file I was not able to upload," which means you cannot lock a consistent voice there the way you can elsewhere. Those figures are his own demonstration, not an audit, and prices in this category move monthly.

Fixing the baked-in text problem. His August 2, 2026 post shows a workflow where a coding agent generates the design file with editable text layers over a generated background, so the headline is not burned into the image. Small, practical, and the kind of thing that saves an afternoon.

Reusing a winner. His September 3, 2026 post describes taking an ad that already converts and re-rendering it with a different on-screen person while keeping the audio, captions and graphics.

How to read him

Three cautions. His performance claims ("ripping on Meta") come without ad-account evidence. His free skills are distributed through a comment-to-message funnel, and at least one public commenter alleged that the link leads to a sales page rather than the skill; he had not replied where we looked. And synthetic on-screen people now carry disclosure obligations in some jurisdictions, which his content does not address; check your own before you publish.

Start here

The May 21 video. It is free, complete, and contains the cost table.

What he sells, and what that means for you

SCALE AI at $67 a month (an annual plan is discounted), which bundles his skills and a tool called ScaleBot, plus self-described consulting for DTC brands, with one brand executive's testimonial on his page. He builds and sells skills around the exact tools he reviews, and we saw no affiliate disclosures on any of it. We also found no independent source that cites his work, so this seat rests on his own published tests. It was the lowest-corroborated seat on the list at selection and it still is; it is here because the domain needed someone doing exactly this, in the open, with numbers.

Not for you if

You are not making video ads. Everything else on this seat is downstream of that one job.

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Part of The Pareto 20, twenty creators who get a solo operator most of the way on AI decisions. How we chose them. Facts above were checked against the creator's own pages on September 12, 2026.