Skinny Mobile digitally cloned its happiest customer and is using her in AI-generated ads

Skinny Mobile, the New Zealand telecom, freely admits it’s using AI to make low-cost ads. Thankfully, those ads—created by Colenso BBDO—are weirdly entertaining, featuring multiple avatars of a customer who was digitally cloned to become the AI face of the brand’s advertising. The customer, Liz Wright, won a contest in which hundreds of people sent in videos explaining why they are Skinny’s happiest customer. She now gets free Skinny service for life, while the brand gets to use her clone in its advertising for two years. Creature Post got to work gathering a range of physical image data from Liz—including a video shoot, 360 body scan, voice recording and stills capture. Using that data, the brand can now make a vast array of Liz characters using AI, beginning with the spot above, in which she appears as various newscasters reporting on her own creation. Thanks to lip-sync and voice replication advancements, Skinny can put Liz into all sorts of fantastical scenarios. And the humor, along with the brand’s promise to pass the cost savings on to its customers, makes what could be a creepy approach actually fun and disarming. “Liz can shapeshift into all sorts of characters, to speak to any audience we want to target,” said Simon Vicars, chief creative officer at Colenso BBDO. “She is the Terminator 2 of brand ambassadors. The ultimate low-cost advertising machine. This is another exciting chapter of creative ingenuity for this great brand, all in the name of keeping prices low for customers. Liz loves Skinny, we love Liz, and we know New Zealand will, too.” Vicars told Ad Age that centering the AI project around a human being was critical to getting buy-in from the target. “When we first teased the idea, there was a bit of animosity on social media, driven by general fear of AI and the mystery of WTF we were actually doing,” he said. “But that quickly shifted when Liz was revealed. Liz was able to talk about how excited she was to be the new face of Skinny. Giving AI a human story was all-important.” A post shared by Skinny (@skinnymobile) “Skinny’s brand promise is that we’ll do anything to keep prices low and customers happy, so that’s exactly what we’ve done,” said Emma Carpenter, Skinny’s brand lead. “We’re cutting advertising costs by digitally cloning our happiest customer.” More Creativity coverage from Ad Age: Sign up for our daily Creativity newsletter to see the best stories of the day.

Skinny Mobile digitally cloned its happiest customer and is using her in AI-generated ads

Featured Stories