When Kiwi telco Skinny told Liz Wright they were going to clone her, she couldn’t quite believe it.
But the process was successful and as of March 3, Skinny launched its AI-powered brand ambassador. According to parent company Spark, it’s a world first.
The digital version of Wright will be remain as ambassador for the next two years, in exchange for a talent fee and mobile credit for life.
Being cloned was surreal, exciting and a whole lot of fun, says Wright, who landed the gig after winning Skinny’s Happiest Customer Competition late last year.
“The process was fascinating – voice capture, motion tracking, a full 360-degree body scan in a specialised booth – all with some of the most creative minds in Aotearoa.
“I imagined it would be super complex but it was way easier than I thought. And let’s be honest, it’s not every day you get to see yourself cloned, let alone become the AI face of a brand you genuinely love,” she adds.
Happy customers, low prices
Skinny is all about happy customers and low prices – having Wright as the new brand ambassador allows them to tick both of these boxes, says Spark Data and Marketing Director Matt Bain.
The brand has a track record of using customers in its marketing, from getting them to star in TVCs or read radio ads, so having a competition to find the happiest customer and using them as the basis for an AI clone made sense, he adds.
“We’ve tried really hard to make sure it was a really accurate representation of a real person and that’s the hard part right? There’s no silver bullet for this yet because it’s an emerging field, so it’s stitching together a number of technologies to enable us to create a true likeness of this.
“Skinny is all about keeping prices low… if we use real people, Skinny is quite limited in how much it can do. So taking a real person but then making it cheaper and easier to then do creatives with that person, we can do more as a brand than we would be able to do on our small budget usually.”
The new ads aim to be crazy while still feeling real – exactly what Skinny would do in any other campaign, explains Bain.
“From our perspective, there’s a through line from everything we’ve done before to this.”
A win-win
Wright, who is based in the Bay of Islands, has been a happy Skinny customer for over 12 years. While she was no stranger to AI, with a son who in the industry over in Australia, AI branding was a whole new space for her.
At first, Wright was just thrilled to be involved, but now she can’t stop raving about it.
“Seeing AI Liz come to life has totally changed my perspective. She’s so lifelike and the best part is, she captures my personality and humour.”
It’s the perfect mix, she adds: smart, cost-effective, keeps the brand fresh while staying true to what makes Skinny special: having an everyday customer at the face of the brand instead of a celebrity.
“Plus, I get to keep living my quiet life in the Bay of Islands, hanging out with my cows, while AI Liz does all the work – it’s a win-win!”
Create the future you want
Humans oversee everything that is put together, but Bain says that the AI has added to the creative process by virture of being “a bit random” and acting in ways the team didn’t expect.
He adds that despite the efficiencies an AI ambassador brings, challenges abound in maintaining Wright’s privacy and security while still delivering the outputs they want.
When it comes to AI and its increasing use across the industry, awareness and transparency is key, says Bain.
“This stuff’s out there now, there’s already deep fakes… As you’ll see in our ad, we call out clearly that AI is used to help make the ad, and that’s important because we don’t want to mislead people, but also because it starts to show people what AI can do.”
As AI progresses, his vision is that what can be done by AI will be, and there’s no better way to predict the future that to create it.
“There’s no reason New Zealand can’t be as innovative with AI than any other business, any other country in the world. And the faster that we evolve the capabilities and understand them and apply them, the more competitive we can be internationally.”
Bain adds that he sees AI as levelling the playing field for small businesses in Aotearoa, opening doors to advertising methods previously only within reach for larger companies.
While some are fearful of what AI could bring to the industry, he encourages people to get optimistic about what the technology could bring if used correctly.
“Most people that are fearful of something, whether it’s sharks or heights or planes or whatever, it’s usually because there’s some ambiguity that they don’t feel comfortable with and they don’t have enough knowledge,” says Bain.
“So the more we can start to make people aware of what’s possible and understand those risks, I think the more we can move forward at pace.”
Skinny’s AI journey
Skinny’s AI journey began five years ago by looking at how the business could better use its data to communicate with its customers and identify their needs, he adds.
“What was cool about that was it forced us quite early on to get a bunch of ethical based principles around AI that forced us to be really careful about things like privacy.”
Bain explains that the first couple of years were focused on understanding how to use AI safely and responsibly.
This led to Skinny developing a set of legal and ethical frameworks, founded from the question, “would our customers feel comfortable with this?”
“That was our guiding principle,” says Bain, “we always start with our customers.”
Want to read more about AI and its impact on the marketing industry? Subscribe to NZ Marketing magazine for Zahra’s upcoming feature on the topic.
