AI Has Grown Up: 10 Days Restages Experiment Creating Ads for Iconic Brands

AI is growing up, and creative agency 10 Days is demonstrating just how fast, with the launch of new AI ads for 10 iconic brands – a like for like experiment from two years ago – and its AI branding studio, ADINTELLIGENCE.AI. 

Two years on from 10 Days’ experiment creating fully AI-generated ads for the first time, the creative agency has revisited the concept with astonishing results. By inputting the exact same four word prompts into Midjourney, 10 Days has produced new visuals for Nespresso, KFC, Wimbledon, British Airways, Gucci, Ray-Ban, Gymshark, Uber, Colgate, and Brewdog, and placed them side by side with their 2022 counterparts. The progress of AI’s capabilities, having developed to also include video results, is striking – take a look here.

The juxtaposed ads make AI’s evolving design trends jump out from the screen. The naivety of the 2022 results becomes clear, with simpler, bold images akin to a child’s view of the world; 2024 is far more complex by comparison, verging on hyperreal. 

The current iteration is bursting with dynamic energy, regularly featuring swirls, splashes, and explosions of intricate details in image backgrounds. Humans also pop up more often, with increasing racial diversity and anatomical accuracy: one visual for Wimbledon shows a woman gripping a tennis racket with near perfect finger spacing. Words, however, still prove a struggle – all text is jumbled or misspelt, whether that’s indicative of a deliberate incapability for legal reasons or just a skill that it lacks.

This year’s video results feel far closer to the 2022 stills. Both share an otherworldly, uncanny valley quality that prohibits the viewer from feeling any real emotion from them, a lesson that Toys “R” Us recently learnt the hard way. The brand’s controversial ad campaign, created almost entirely using Sora from OpenAI, showcases a clear narrative arc – yet viewers just can’t feel connection.

When used as a tool to support humans in the process of production rather than an originator, however, AI input is reaping rewards. Both Mercado Libre ‘Handshake Hunt’ and Orange’s ‘WoMen’s Football,’ which uses deepfake technology to showcase biases around women’s sports, took home awards at this year’s Cannes Lions, having shown AI’s power in enabling great ideas that wouldn’t have been possible before.

Living up to their name, the team at 10 Days has long been using AI to speed up every stage of their creative process, from concepting and prototyping to production, as can be seen in the case study section of the Ad Intelligence website. In particular, they’ve been tapping into its ability to create and explore visual worlds, with recent examples including fruit snack brand Zombie. AI was also leveraged to create characters and backgrounds for a children’s story based on the infamous Jake Paul vs Tommy Fury boxing match, with client Cano Water being the sponsor of the latter. Currently, the creative agency is crafting branding and packaging for an alcohol brand using AI at the core of its development.

To help other businesses do the same, whether creating brands from scratch or rebranding,10 Days is launching ADINTELLIGENCE.AI. The design studio will help businesses use the best of AI to develop logos, distinctive assets, packaging, brand characters, and brand worlds, from brief to delivered all in 10 days. 

Jolyon White, 10 Days co-founder, comments, “10 Days is built on challenging ‘the way things are done’ in this industry. We jump at any opportunity to disrupt or innovate. Two years ago we set out to show what was possible using AI; today we use it as an essential tool to speed up all processes of what we do from creative to production. We have a saying at 10 Days: ‘why walk when you can run’. AI helps us run faster so let’s see how fast we can go.” 

George White, 10 Days co-founder, adds, “We see exponential growth in AI capability – more accurate, easier to use, and a tool everyone will be using. It will lower barriers into the industry, enabling a new wave of people to be more creative. Anyone who puts their heads in the sand will be left behind. I agree with Elon Musk’s comment at Cannes this year: ‘We will see quite radical changes, even next year, and very radical changes in five years… companies that will succeed in this transition period will be the ones that most effectively use AI.’ The key question is when will AI be able to bring creative originality.”