One Draws the Words, One Draws the Scene — and My Ad Campaign Needed Both Orders

The campaign brief was simple: a poster series with real, readable text, plus short video cutdowns for social. I assumed Ideogram would own the posters and Runway the cutdowns. The interesting part was the middle ground where both fought for the same job.

Ideogram renders text like it actually respects typography. Taglines came out legible on the first or second try, kerning included, which no other generator I've used manages reliably. For print-ready key visuals with words baked in, it's not a contest.

Runway ignored the text battle and won the motion one. The cutdowns came from animating the poster art — camera moves, atmosphere, that expensive-looking drift. Runway's image mode exists but nobody chooses it over a dedicated image model, and after a week I understood why.

The crossover I didn't expect: Runway can fake a 'poster reveal' video without Ideogram at all, and Ideogram's clean PNGs give Runway better raw material than its own generations. They're not rivals. They're sequential steps in one pipeline, and fighting about it wastes a week you could spend shipping.