Welcome to Creating the Impossible Ad, a series covering the Google AI Lighthouse program, which challenges agencies to make an impossible ad campaign with the help of Google AI. Here, we talk to digital-first marketing and technology services provider Monks about its personalization-driven campaign for sleep wellness company Hatch.
Fundamentally, great marketing has always been about finding the right audience and connecting them with the right message. Identifying new ad audiences can be difficult, but to have unlimited time to interview and dig deep on multiple new audiences? Impossible.
Or, it used to be. When digital-first marketing and technology services provider Monks was challenged to use Google AI in their newest campaign for sleep wellness company Hatch, they enlisted Google’s generative AI chatbot, Gemini, to roleplay customer personas. The team developed “The Everything Machine,” a personalized campaign about achieving better sleep—and they delivered the kind of results marketers dream of.
Monks presented the Hatch campaign at the Cannes International Festival for Creativity as part of the Google AI Lighthouse program. The program challenges agencies to make an “impossible” idea for an ad possible with the help of AI. Above all, the solutions to the brief showed how agencies and marketers can effectively utilize artificial intelligence within the creative workflow. Below, we’ll break down the three key stages that Monks turned to Gemini for, and how AI ultimately ensured they wouldn’t lose any sleep over campaign strategy.
Make AI your always-on focus group
Hatch tasked Monks with launching their new smart clock, the Restore 2, to new and previously overlooked audiences. With limited time and budget, Monks turned to Gemini to find potential customers. “We asked Gemini to look at social media trend reports, search queries, industry reports, to do competitor analysis, and to come back to us with some ideas on the personas that we should be targeting,” said Brittany Blanchard, executive VP of digital media at Monks.
Once Gemini identified a set of audiences, Monks asked Gemini to determine which were most likely to engage with potential ads and purchase the smart clock. The agency came away with three key personas: the Stressed Professional, the Biohacker, and the Wellness Enthusiast. They then interviewed each persona, as played by Gemini, to create vivid profiles encompassing their likes, hobbies, sleep patterns, aesthetic tastes, and more.
Create a vision for every kind of customer
Because of time or budget constraints, a traditional campaign might send every audience the same core message. But by enabling AI’s speed and scale, Gemini helped the team take their creative further.
“AI can allow you to go broad and also bring more focus, all at the same time, because of the power of scale,” said Roni Sebastian, the executive creative director at Monks. “Whereas, without the power of AI, with limited time, with limited budget, you’re really just trying to find common ground among multiple audiences.”
Once the team chose the ad messaging that a good night’s sleep could unlock possibilities, they used Gemini to determine what that meant for each archetype. “What we were looking for was not a one-size-fits-all message as much as a core promise that would stay consistent, even as the messaging adapts to uniquely speak to each of those audience mindsets,” Sebastian said.
But the agency’s use of Google AI did not stop at strategy. Monks used the generative, photo-realistic picture creator ImageFX to create visual and copy assets capturing what each persona might consider the definition of a great day. For the Stressed Professional, that meant nailing a boardroom presentation; for the Wellness Enthusiast, learning a new yoga pose. And each persona was asked to describe their ideal bedroom to complete the splitscreen.
“We were able to converse with Gemini and understand, ‘What are their lifestyle aspirations? What interior design aesthetics would resonate with them and influence their shopping habits?’” Sebastian said. “And it would feed us a very articulate description of these bedrooms, so that functioned as the first draft of a prompt that we could then feed into AI to start generating imagery.”
Deliver a hyper-personalized campaign at scale
Finally, the time came to apply the Gemini conversations to real audience segmentation. “We were able to take all of those little things that didn't make it into the creative and add it into search themes and affinity targeting,” said Tory Lariar, senior VP of paid search at Monks.
The team used Performance Max, an AI-powered campaign distributor to bring their ads to market across Google properties. “We let Google's AI determine which ad [variant] each user should see in any given auction based on all of the signals available to it,” Blanchard said.
The Hatch campaign delivered an 80% improved click-through rate, 46% more engaged site visitors, and a 31% improved cost-per-purchase than other campaigns. On top of this, Monks was able to deliver the campaign with 50% fewer design and production hours than typically scoped for the number and type of creative assets produced.
“You're just scratching the surface if you only consider efficiency gains when it comes to how you're harnessing AI,” Blanchard said of the ways AI can be leveraged. When creatives and marketers use AI-powered products, they can not only do more faster, but also turn “impossible” ideas into successful campaigns.
