Brands are increasingly using AI to make ads cheaper and faster. But audiences have become increasingly adept at spotting something artificial. Is there a way to bridge the reality gap? Perhaps the only way is to get weirder, not real-er.
Four Seasons Naked Condoms’ recently wrapped ‘Rise of the STIs’ campaign points to a different possibility: audiences are more willing to embrace AI when the work makes no attempt to hide what it is.
The campaign, created by Emotive in partnership with AiCandy, turned chlamydia, gonorrhoea and syphilis into giant, grotesque monsters rampaging through the Sydney skyline, complete with a 100-foot baby and deliberately clunky animatronic-style creatures.
It was absurd by design.
And according to Emotive founder and chief executive Simon Joyce, that was part of why it worked.
The campaign recorded a 27-point lift in Four Seasons’ brand awareness, rising from 17 per cent to 44 per cent, while ad recall jumped 39 points from 11 per cent to 50 per cent.
Retail sales at Woolworths were also up 15 per cent during the campaign period compared with the same period a year earlier.
On Snapchat, where 90 per cent of the campaign’s media spend was concentrated, the work reached 1.5 million people, three-quarters of whom were aged between 16 and 24. It generated 13 million impressions and 125,000 clicks to the campaign website, while Meta delivered more than 300,000 video plays.
For Joyce, those numbers provide an interesting counterpoint to the idea that AI-generated advertising automatically creates an emotional disconnect.
“I think most of them aren’t connecting emotionally,” Joyce said.
What their campaign did differently was make no attempt to disguise the artificiality of its world.
“We never tried to dupe the audience and make anyone think this is real,” Joyce said.
That distinction matters at a time when audiences are becoming increasingly accustomed to questioning the content they come across online.
Joyce described consumers as effectively “filtering harder” and constantly asking whether what they are seeing is real or not.
Rather than fighting that instinct, ‘Rise of the STIs’ gave audiences nothing to decipher and the artificiality became the entertainment.
The spot also offered a useful distinction between using AI to make an existing idea and using AI to make an outlandish idea possible.
“We could have never dreamed of making something like that two years ago for a brand that doesn’t have a big budget,” Joyce said.
The production was still human-led, with AI filmmakers brought into the creative process from the outset and months spent refining performances, character consistency, movement, camera language, lighting, scale and sound.
And the technology was far from effortless.
Joyce said maintaining character consistency across a longer narrative remained particularly difficult, with even small changes potentially creating knock-on effects elsewhere in a sequence.
The technology enabled the scale but the creative team still had to make the audience care about what happened.
That became particularly important because the campaign was dealing with a subject audiences have plenty of information about already.
The problem Four Seasons was trying to address was not awareness of STIs. Young Australians were using condoms less frequently while infection rates were moving in the opposite direction.
The creative response was therefore not another warning but a spectacle.
The campaign began with a young couple deciding not to use a condom, before that decision unleashed an absurd monster apocalypse where the infections became characters rather than statistics.
“Don’t shame Gen Z. Don’t lecture them,” Joyce said.
The hypothesis was that humour and absurdity could create an emotional entry point where another serious health message might be filtered out.
Joyce was reluctant to turn that into a universal formula for AI advertising: “I don’t think you can make a general statement.”
But he did see a potential relationship between AI and exaggerated creative worlds.
When an idea requires hyperbole, unusual characters or a world that would be prohibitively expensive to build traditionally, AI can give the creative team an advantage that is difficult to replicate through conventional production.
That raised a broader question for advertising: is AI most convincing when it stops trying to be convincing?
Perhaps the most revealing part of the campaign was not the hero film.
Once the characters had been established, Emotive could use them to respond to audience comments in near real time.
That meant the AI characters could enter the comments section and continue the campaign themselves.
Joyce said this was one of the elements that surprised him most during the campaign, describing the ability to create responses based on what audiences were saying as a particularly powerful creative application.
It also changed the role of the AI assets.
They became a creative toolkit that could keep generating new interactions around the campaign and that may be where the Four Seasons experiment becomes particularly relevant to the wider AI advertising conversation.
The question is increasingly not whether AI can make an ad look real but, what can brands make with AI that audiences would never have encountered without it?
For Four Seasons, the answer was giant STI monsters, a baby kaiju and a condom-wearing superhero.
The results have suggested audiences watched it, remembered it, clicked on it, shared it and, at least during the campaign period, bought more condoms.
Whether absurdity is the secret ingredient for AI advertising remains an open question.
