The night before Christmas at No Brainer
A Merry Christmas to all our clients, partners, team, and everyone else!
This year, the emergence of AI has been increasingly prevalent in the world of marketing, with agencies navigating the minefield of how to work with it, rather than against it.
So, we couldn’t think of a better way to close 2023 than celebrating a marketing trend that’s here for the long haul.
The creation process
We came together as a team to figure out how we wanted to position our annual Christmas card. The main objective this year was to make it digital, steering away from our usual material card, and going more eco-friendly (more to come on that soon…!)
Ideas flew back and forth but there was one theme which kept cropping up, “how can we incorporate AI?“
As an agency, we’re keen to stay up to date with the latest tools and technologies so it felt like a great opportunity to create something unique and innovative that stretched much further than the typical Christmas card.
So, the idea of No Brainer’s Christmas Carol was born.
In our story, The night before Christmas at No Brainer, we have worked with AI tools, including Chat GPT, its counter part DALL-E, and WriteSonic, to develop a short video clip that is completely AI generated.
From the images and the story to the voice over, everything has been chosen to represent the modern day of marketing and, if we do say so ourselves, we’re pretty pleased with the results!
Why did we choose AI?
AI has without doubt been one of the marketing trends of the year, and we’re always keen to get involved with new technologies for our clients to see how we can integrate these into our daily work and campaigns.
According to the 2023 state of marketing AI report, 98% of marketers use AI in some way, demonstrating how dominant it is in the industry and the potential it holds.
More so, 45% of respondents said they were experimenting with AI and 29% said it’s already infused into their daily workflows, meaning this relationship with AI will only grow and evolve over time.
We’ve seen the rapid transformation of AI tools, including Chat GPT and Mid Journey, which have been churning out updates left, right and centre to stay ahead of the curve.
We thought it was important to acknowledge the ever-changing environment we’re working in by paying homage to AI this festive season, but from the development of this year’s Christmas card, we can safely say AI can’t do everything alone. The human touch is still really needed.
What challenges did we come up against with AI?
AI was so helpful at each stage of the process. But in fact, what is a short 1 minute 30 second clip actually took hours of our time to create.
From ideation to adaption and activation, this has been down to us, and AI has often taken its own direction, which has increased our time spent on it.
AI is meant to help speed up processes, but in this instance, when you have a clear idea of how you’d like your campaign to appear, then you also have to use patience until you get your desired result.
In the long term, it took as long as if we’d hired a graphic designer or illustrator to create the images from scratch (we work with some amazing ones!), AND it would have been a lot easier to explain to these partners the full brief and what exact amendments we wanted to make.
Whereas with our AI tool, even being as descriptive as we were, it still took multiple attempts to get the desired effect – I mean, we’re talking more than 100 tries.
It was certainly a learning experience, utilising every aspect of AI to bring this campaign together.
Our overall opinion on AI
Having burst onto the scene a year ago, the rise and rise of Generative AI has been nothing short of incredible.
As a business, we believe these tools are exciting opportunities to enhance our creative processes and develop unique strategies for our clients, in which we can do even more work of the highest quality.
We are actively testing them in various capacities to understand their capabilities, limitations, and potential applications to allow us to do our jobs even better.
We’d like to encourage a mindset of collaboration with AI, viewing these tools as creative partners that offer new perspectives or solutions – while staying true to our commitment to maintaining the vital human touch in all our work. After all, the essence of all our services relies upon the creativity, expertise, and personalised approach that our team brings to each project and piece of work.
