How Design Military Used AI to Create Quirky Retail Marketing campaign

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Life on this desolate, wind-swept planet is available in two types: large eyeballs that appear extra endearing than eerie, and impossibly trendy individuals with various levels of astigmatism.

If that sounds just like the setup for a fashion-forward sci-fi flick, it’s no accident. Unbiased company Design Military has created a retro-futuristic world straight out of a traditional Fifties B-movie for a brand new marketing campaign for retailer Georgetown Optician.

To develop the digital and print belongings, Design Military turned to synthetic intelligence to fulfill a good one-month deadline and coincide with a brand new retailer opening for the brick-and-mortar model. “Adventures in A-Eye,” a pun-filled journey to a fictional no man’s land, marks the company’s first take a look at of AI expertise.

“We took a danger in partnering with a non-human,” Pum Lefebure, chief inventive officer and co-founder, advised Adweek. “And whereas it doesn’t take a lot time for AI to spit out a picture, it takes time to do it proper and nail the execution.”

The human contact

A number of the frequent criticisms of AI are true, Lefebure mentioned, and it might really feel “soulless and stiff” by itself. It requires “the human contact,” she mentioned, similar to photograph manipulation, animation, sound design and typography.

AI took the lead on expertise choice, wardrobe and placement, for example, whereas different key components got here from the inventive workforce, which additionally added the model’s eyeglasses in post-production. 

Whereas she loves the pace, “I hate AI’s stubbornness,” Lefebure mentioned. “We experimented endlessly till it discovered the artwork path we favored.”

Because it’s usually perceived as a menace, AI recurrently finds itself within the crosshairs of inventive debate, which Lefebure finds short-sighted, even after capturing real-life campaigns for 15 years.

“Haters say you’re not creating something—you’re simply punching in phrases, that there’s no creativity,” Lefebure mentioned. “I disagree. The key to AI success is admittedly understanding the way to immediate with a laser-focused imaginative and prescient and method it as a collaboration versus a one-and-done answer.”

Eyelian invasion

Whereas feeling each “curious and uncomfortable,” the workforce embraced the problem, utilizing AI “similar to some other design instrument,” Lefebure mentioned. 

The result’s a sequence of video snippets—together with a 30-second spot and print items—that goals to take viewers on a journey to an “unknown planet” the place vacationers have to put on glasses to guard themselves from the cruel surroundings.

There are clues immediately, although, that this work might be campy, not creepy: the celebs of “Adventures in A-Eye” have names like Eyesaiah, Eyeris, Eyeliot and Eyereen. Looming giant within the scene, however not menacing anybody is the primary character named Eyelian.