The groundbreaking new ad, believed to be the first AI-generated ad to air in New Zealand, is part of a planned $2 million-plus advertising campaign by local woollen and carpet manufacturer Bremworth.
Experts say the technology could transform New Zealand’s media sector and Kiwi businesses, allowing them to develop complex video advertising content without creative restrictions and in much less time than would be required using traditional methods – freeing up more budget to spend on media and increasing the number of vehicles they can use to market their products.
Rochelle Flint, chief brand and product officer of Bremworth, says they originally explored the use of AI as a more time-efficient way to produce still imagery for new product launches without a traditional photo shoot.
She says the technology may also be used to reduce the cost of creating content to help promote New Zealand wool in offshore markets such as Australia and North America: “When you are launching an entirely new range of carpet with multiple colour variations these tend to be made in large batches which can take weeks to complete. The issue for businesses like ours is they are reliant on producing physical inventories before they can create visual assets.
“When the manufacturing and marketing processes are out of sync in this manner, it emerges as an opportunity cost, which in this case has ramifications for the strong wool industry.
“Using AI, we can create a rug in a single colour and use technology to bring to life an abstract rendering of our creative vision to tell the story behind each product and help consumers visualise what it will look like on the home page.
“For our Crafted Feels Different campaign, this allowed us to develop content that was difficult, time-consuming and expensive to create in real-world conditions where life is limited by reality, and this resulted in a significant reduction in the lead time between production and going live with the content.
Flint says the cost savings from the production have been reinvested into local media platforms.
She says the technology was so new it presented a risk that they may not be able to deliver a market-ready TVC as a part of the broader campaign: “Video production is usually the most expensive element of developing a TV campaign and can easily run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
“The use of AI has allowed us to reduce the cost of production by around 60% – which has been reinvested into media space and extended our reach by an estimated 1.7 million views in local channels.
“Artificial intelligence in this form is still in its early stages, and employing it in this way would have been impossible even six months ago. While we were initially concerned, our experiments were effective, and we proceeded to build the entire campaign.
“The generation of creative material in this manner has the potential to expand the accessibility of the New Zealand media business, therefore retaining more expenditure in this market rather than with foreign tech giants like Google and Meta.
“In this instance, it enabled us to promote on local media that we otherwise would not have been able to.”
Flint says the use of AI has opened up new possibilities, allowing them to experiment with more innovative and interesting campaign content while reducing both time and cost: “While there is an interesting juxtaposition between one of our oldest primary sector outputs and cutting-edge AI, wool is an incredibly versatile fibre and the use of the new technology has been necessary to create a campaign to elevate its status.”
The new campaign was live telecasted on New Zealand television networks, TV on demand, and digital media channels.
source – https://campaignbrief.co.nz/2024/09/30/production-of-new-zealands-first-tvc-using-ai-set-to-boost-new-zealand-wool-industry/
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