How Publicis used AI to create personalized videos for its 100,000 employees

Will the real Arthur Sadoun please stand up? To celebrate the New Year, Publicis Groupe turned to artificial intelligence to make 100,000 personalized videos, one for each employee. Check out the latest Ad Age events and award programs Each video begins the same, with Publicis Groupe’s CEO Arthur Sadoun saying he would like to thank each employee individually for their work toward building the holding company in 2023. He goes on to say that’s not possible—until he gets cut off by his AI twin who strides into the frame. “You look pretty good, except for the hair,” Sadoun jokes to his AI twin. The AI twin then takes over the video with personalized messages for each employee. Some are addressed in the employees’ native languages and many are tailored to their interests, such as skiing or parkour. Consider Eva, a managing partner who lives in Austria, and Gabi, a business lead from Sao Paulo. AI Sadoun honors Eva by showing off a tattoo of Eva’s name before being interrupted by an AI twin of Publicis Chief Strategy Officer, Carla Serrano, via video chat. Sadoun asks if this is the real Carla, to which AI Serrano responds, “What do you think?” The AI version of Serrano then credits Marcel, Publicis’s AI work platform, for knowing that Eva enjoys sports, before cutting to a montage of AI Serrano climbing a mountain, playing tennis and dancing as a ballerina on stage. Look back: Publicis claps back at Marcel critics Each video follows the same template, except instead of a tattoo Sadoun might hold a mug with an employee’s name on it or write an employee’s name on his desk. Other Publicis executives are also featured in the videos engaging in employees’ hobbies through AI. The other executives include Maurice Lévy, chairman of Publicis Groupe’s supervisory board; Dave Penski, CEO of Publicis Media U.S.; Nigel Vaz, CEO of Publicis Sapient; and Agathe Bousquet, president of Publicis Groupe France. For example, Penski can be seen riding a horse and Bousquet is shown riding a skateboard and playing video games. “AI image is pretty evolved. ChatGPT and Midjourney are really good,” said Serrano, but “AI video is really unstable. So when we decided to do this, we were well aware that it is an emerging technology and that this was an experiment.” One challenge was using nine different AI tools and partners to create the videos, which all live on different platforms. This included help from Nvidia and OpenAI, as well as AI voice generator Eleven Labs, AI video tool HeyGen for voice training and Runway for AI video creation. Serrano said the idea originated between August and September. Throughout the process, the holding company had to change partners and the video concept because of technology limitations. “Our initial script wanted us talking and moving at the same time,” Serrano said. “We had to change our concept because it was not stable and there was almost too much variability happening at the same time. AI video is brilliant for a second or three seconds, for four seconds, but to be able to consistently tell a story, it’s just never been done before at scale.” For example, in the sequences where Lévy is wakeboarding or Serrano is playing tennis, the original idea was to have the AI doppelgangers speak at the same time as the movements were being performed. The changes led to the videos being released in January rather than before Christmas as had been the case for past New Year’s videos. “I am so proud of the team because this was so difficult to do, and there were times back in November where I was like, ‘Okay, let’s just shoot a film and do something funny and traditional,” Serrano said. “But I think it is worth it. The future of AI within our business is real and we have to get ahead of it. So here’s our attempt. I noticed that there were a lot of AI holiday cards or what have you that a lot of people used AI for static images, and we could have done something like that, but that’s very easy to do right now." She added: "This is a classic Arthur project.” Also read: The Top 5 agency holiday cards of 2023 Andy Bird, founding partner and chief creative officer of Le Truc, led the project, coordinating 100 people globally from Le Truc, Saatchi & Saatchi Canada, PXP, Prodigious and Harbor, among others. The team trained the AI on many different aspects of the video, including the jokes. “We wrote the jokes originally, and we trained the machine to write like them,” Bird said. “But there are limitations to how much you can replicate. “Certain things work really well, and some jokes are bad,” Bird said. Each person had to record their voice for an hour to train the AI, especially since 35 languages were incorporated into the videos. “It has to be your normal voice and telling a story, being sad, being angry, being whatever,” Serrano said. “It has to be your natural reactions from a movement standpoint. There’s a lot of technical shoot happening so that it understands your body and how you gesticulate.” Check out the latest Ad Age events and award programs Other aspects were easier to personalize, such as the tattoos with people’s names on them, which all were designed by machines and for the most part had different styles, Bird said. To cater each video to each person’s interests, Publicis used its proprietary system Marcel, which, like a social media platform, asks employees about their interests. “We clustered in groups what the biggest ones were,” Serrano said. Some clusters included interests in travel, sports, and photography. There was also an element of trust in the project; Bird said it was impossible to check every single video before sending it out. “There are going to be some glitches in it,” Bird said. “There are going to be some things that aren't perfect in the ones that go out, we have to accept that.” Beyond a message to its employees, Serrano said clients are also interested in seeing the final product for their own marketing purposes. “All this work is worth it for two reasons,” Serrano said. “One is that we were able to actually personalize stuff for people, and then the second is that we are a company that experiments and has ambitions and we know that AI is going to be a part of our lives and we got to get on with it. It’s okay that it’s not perfect yet, but to get ahead of it is really important for our company.”

How Publicis used AI to create personalized videos for its 100,000 employees

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