Responses by Brian Murray, chief creative officer, Zulu Alpha Kilo.
Background: Campbell’s has been famously associated with pop art since the ’60s. Today, we’re using AI to create a new collection of Campbell’s-inspired paintings in the style of past masters. Our goal was to build brand awareness while reaching modern adults aged 25 to 44, but many within that audience see our brand as old fashioned. So, we leaned into this new technology to help them see the brand as culturally relevant.
Design thinking: As we were exploring ways of using AI to reach our audience, we realized how exceptional AI can be when it comes to re-creating art styles from various periods. Campbell’s has been an art icon in the past, so we wondered: What if other legendary artists had been inspired by the soup can?
Challenges: There was a lot of trial and error as we explored various prompts to emulate specific art styles throughout history. In some cases, the Campbell’s can would be unrecognizable or the art produced just wouldn’t be visually pleasing. By exploring prompt engineering, we were eventually able to arrive at the final pieces for our campaign.
Favorite details: Our AI tools generated some truly unexpected visuals with details that we’ve come to really appreciate. For example, in the surrealist painting, there are melting golden clouds that we didn’t expect to see but really fell in love with.
New lessons: Different AI art generators create vastly different pieces of art. We experimented with multiple AI tools but quickly realized that some of them couldn’t produce artwork that was visually compelling or even output the size of files we needed for OOH placements. After some trial and error, we settled on Midjourney for this project.
Specific project demands: In some cases, our AI tools would output beautiful visuals but in a different aspect ratio than what we needed. For example, the visual would be square, but we needed it to be vertical for a transit shelter placement. So, we used AI generative fill to extend the paintings into the taller formats we needed to make sure the paintings were generated entirely by AI.
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