An Original Source shower gel advert majority generated by artificial intelligence has helped boost the brand’s value sales by 4.5%, PZ Cussons has revealed.
The 37-second TV commercial – which first aired in late February and is the brand’s first for several years – features 70% AI created content, and had seen Original Source hit its highest market penetration in four years, said Alex Glen, head of shower portfolio UKI, PZ Cussons.
The ad – understood to be the first from a UK brand to put AI visuals “front and centre” in a mainstream TV campaign – also saw 16% growth in the number of consumers agreeing with the statement Original Source is ‘different to other shower gels’.
Speaking at the Mad//Fest marketing conference in London this week, Glen said the ad was created in response to research showing consumers were “just generally weary, they’re tired, they’ve got busy lives. They’re emotively tired and they’re mentally tired.”
Further, the brand wanted to contrast with other brands in the washing and bathing category that often present nature and natural ingredients as “gentle and worthy, and it’s quite dull” – and in doing so appeal to a younger demographic.
With creative advertising agency Fold7, a “very simple execution” was born, explained the agency’s executive creative director Dave Billing: “Someone that’s tired, gets in the shower, has their Original Source, and is then carried on this wave of energy to work.
“There’s a bunch of ways you could have done this with all the time and money in the world. You could probably have had wire work and you could have shot it over a number of days,” Billing said.
The use of AI was inspired by digital creators making “quite fun, AI transition-based videos” which, while “a little bit shonky and a little bit internet-y”, were “the sort of content our audience is consuming already” he added.
Live-action footage of a real human actor on real-life sets were filmed – showing the character in the shower for the beginning of the ad and arriving at his work desk at the end, as well as lots of additional reference footage of the actor and his facial expressions for the AI to work from.
Billing called it a “hybrid production”, the live action elements providing a “degree of control”.
“We’re not going to just sort of, you know, press the button and hope for the best,” he said. There was also a “hell of a lot of human endeavour” and post-production VFX work to ensure the AI outputs looked good enough to air and consistent between scenes.
Original Source’s ad is not the first fmcg ad to lean heavily on AI-generated content. Coca-Cola’s famous ‘Holidays Are Coming’ Christmas advert last year was “fully created with artificial intelligence” it said. Beyond the sector, last month a wholly AI generated ad – produced in just two days for $2,000 – aired during the NBA Finals in the US for Kalshi, a trading platform to bet on the outcome of real-world events.
Billing emphasised that the use of AI in ads remained an “intensely human process”.
“I would always argue that AI is only as good as the inputs you give it. And humans are best for those inputs. AI can do its magic. But where humans come back in is that matter of taste – is this what you require? Does this meet the criteria that you have set? – which AI has not yet replicated,” Billing said.
It also needed to be “aesthetically right for the idea”, he added.
“AI being forced into the sort of areas it shouldn’t be, where the audience might not be familiar with that aesthetic is not necessarily the right idea,” he said. “In this case, it was a Goldilocks situation where the audience is seeing this sort of content. So it felt right.”
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