El Salar Burgers Launches Advertising Campaign Created with Artificial Intelligence to Reject Artificiality
In a groundbreaking move that combines technology with traditional print advertising, El Salar Burgers has unveiled a new campaign with a powerful message against artificial ingredients.
El Salar is a renowned Bolivian brand known for its premium 100% organic burgers. From selecting the finest beef cuts to grinding the meat in-house and baking their own soft and uniquely flavoured premium buns, El Salar takes pride in producing everything from scratch. Tito Eguino, partner and executive chef of the gastronomic company, emphasised the brand's commitment to quality.
To capture the essence of their uniqueness, the advertising agency decided to take an unconventional approach by utilising a rather "unorganic" tool to create the campaign: Artificial Intelligence.
In 2023, Artificial Intelligence took centre stage, with Chat GPT, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, Dall-e, and other AIs gaining popularity among internet users. However, along with their fame came a heated debate regarding the errors often made by AI, particularly in image generation.
Imperfections started to emerge in images of seemingly flawless human figures enjoying themselves at parties, creating an eerie and almost nightmarish effect. These images flooded social media, displaying people with seven fingers, double the number of teeth, body parts that don't exist in reality, and other nearly imperceptible flaws within the otherwise perfect human renderings.
Not even the Pope was spared from this phenomenon. One internet user posted a series of images depicting Pope Francis dancing hip-hop at an underground party, with an astonishing level of detail that could make even the most sceptical doubt whether the Pope himself was dancing like a top-notch hip-hop artist.
However, few noticed the intricate details, such as the Pope's extra fingers, elongated deformed palms, and other errors that became part of the norm due to the brain's tendency to correct what appears wrong. Visual exercises with jumbled words that can still be read are a testament to this psychological effect of rectifying and making sense of the erroneous.
THE CAMPAIGN
El Salar, the Bolivian brand known for its 100% organic burgers, seized upon this trend to emphasise its main strength, aligning with the healthy and non-artificial movement championed by other leading brands.
"As a challenger brand, we dared to play and challenge the status quo, communicating our differentiating factor using tools that allow us to generate advertising on par with major brands. With limited budgets, we sought a creative partner who could help us optimise our investment with high-level creativity. Who better than Ogilvy Bolivia, the most awarded agency in the country, to achieve this?" stated Jorge Chávez, partner and COO of El Salar Burgers.
According to Henry Medina, CCO of the multi-award-winning agency Ogilvy Bolivia, "The idea is simple. We asked Midjourney to create images of young people eating burgers, and the Artificial Intelligence did its part by making the anticipated errors. Midjourney generated a woman with three fingers, a boy with a third cheese lip, and another with a salmon tongue. The campaign came to life from there. Unlike other campaigns, we didn't have headlines for each artwork or sketches since we relied on the errors made by Artificial Intelligence. That was the key and the differentiator of this disruptive campaign. We were a little afraid that it wouldn't happen, but it did. The errors of the artificial were there, waiting to be transformed into advertising brushstrokes, delivering the concept: artificial is not that good for humans."
