How Lenovo and AI Made Queen Latifah the Face of Small Business; EVERY Small Business

For small businesses, getting noticed is more than half the battle. That’s partly why the electronics giant Lenovo pioneered its ‘Evolve Small’ initiative, providing financial aid, tech resources, community support, and mentorship for participating small businesses across North America. 

Nonetheless, more was possible. More like, for example, providing an A-list celebrity spokesperson to become the face and voice for businesses who might otherwise lack the clout and funds to attract a famous name. But what was the best way to connect a popular, charismatic spokesperson to a small business? And, more challengingly, how could Lenovo provide that opportunity for any small business which wished to participate? 

Enter artificial intelligence, with the help of the minds at media company 3 Monkeys Zeno and digital creative agency Wildlife. Like casting some kind of magic spell, the technical wizards were able to bring an endorsement from the legendary Queen Latifah to small businesses looking to give their marketing an edge.

The result was a groundbreaking campaign which lays bare the potential for AI to, with the help of smart creativity and strategy, transform the marketing potential of any business we care to imagine.

To find out more about the campaign and discover how it came together, LBB sat down with Wildlife’s co-founder and ECD Scott Friedman. 

Above: The Wildlife team leaned into extraordinary, pioneering AI technology to help Queen Latifah become the spokesperson for any small or medium sized business. 

LBB> Hi, Scott. First things first - what was the initial brief which came through to you, and how closely does your initial vision align to the final campaign?

Scott> 3 Monkeys Zeno came to us looking for a breakthrough method to support Lenovo’s Evolve Small initiative. As part of this year’s campaign, the challenge was to create a web experience that SMBs could use to create their own custom commercial - supported by an AI-powered, virtual avatar of the campaign’s spokesperson Queen Latifah. 

Through a custom shoot with Queen Latifah to gather the audio and video elements needed to train our machine learning model, we’re exceptionally proud of how good the results are and what we were able to build so early in this technology’s lifecycle.

LBB> This activation represented a world-first. But do you feel as though we’re only at the crest of a wave in terms of deep fake celebrities endorsing brands? How far away do you think we are from the idea being totally normalised?

Scott> There’s no question we’re at the very early stages of what will become a more common type of celebrity participation. In our case, it was about creating content with our celebrity talent that would never otherwise be possible at scale. There’s simply no way we could deliver custom video spots to every small business going through our experience without the ability to scale that’s unlocked through this kind of deep fake. 

The possibilities for this kind of personalisation of scripted content for different users, demographics and use cases has already expanded since the launch of our Evolve Small platform. Based on the rate of advances we’re seeing, I’d guess this means we’ll see more normalised workflows like this in the next year or two.

There’s still a lot of manual work involved to create quality models and the results have limitations, but those are rapidly shrinking every single day. Where we currently need dozens of minutes of specifically directed video samples and as much data on someone’s voice to create a convincing double, future requirements will be as small as a single photo and a few seconds of someone speaking. 

A tiny sample of what they look and sound like will allow for content that’s virtually indistinguishable from the real person, making their likeness fully malleable to say anything, in any outfit and setting, complete with every possible emotion. Kinda scary, really!

Above: A series of behind-the-scenes images from Queen Latifah’s groundbreaking, AI-powered shoot. 

LBB> Yeah, there’s certainly a mind-boggling aspect to the tech on display, here. Did your experience of working on this campaign have any impact on your view of the nefarious potential of deep fakes?

Scott> Yes, absolutely. There are a ton of huge existential questions this kind of technology unlocks. Following the developments of things like ChatGPT, Midjourney, RunwayML and other generative AI models makes you wonder how we’ll ever know what is real. You’ve gotta think the next big arms race is for AI that helps detect the presence of AI in content…

LBB> And, as creators, what’s personally most exciting to you about the tech you worked with on this campaign?

Scott> The ability to make adjustments after a shoot, to build on what you capture but for it to be still malleable and adaptable is a nice creative mindset to dream about. You can already change depth of field on photos captured on an iPhone after it’s taken, breakthroughs in NERF technology are opening the door to new camera angles and AI-powered platforms tools will soon let us relight any image and change the mood entirely. 

Removing these limitations on how audiences can personalise and create their own variations opens the possibilities of creativity in exciting ways. Everything is dynamic and alive - nothing is final. That’s both a terrifying thought, and one full of freedom.

LBB> You’ve mentioned that this campaign is set to ‘unlock immense possibilities in future implementation’. Can you give us any kind of hint as to what implementations you might have in mind?

Scott> Time on set with celebrity talent is always a challenge - this kind of technology could allow us to capture the core elements we need for an activation or campaign and build far more compelling and personalised content across platforms. It would help us truly deliver on the promise of dynamic storytelling and interactive, immersive experiences.

LBB> What was the most challenging aspect of putting this project together, and how did you overcome it?

Scott> This kind of technology is still so new, any kind of application requires a lot of trial and error, creative problem solving, and clever uses of a combination of toolsets to create a seamless end result. Time for R&D in production timelines is a rare luxury but luckily our team had been playing around with individual pieces of the pipeline that we could quickly assemble into something fresh, effective and ready for primetime.

LBB> On a final note, the potential of this technology for so many businesses is enormous. With Queen Latifah excluded, if you could pick any celebrity to become the voice of Wildlife who would it be - and what would you have them say?! 

Scott> That’s a tough question with infinite answers! Could there be a cooler biz dev option than Kaneda from Akira pitching our services speeding through Neo-tokyo on his iconic motorcycle? Maybe Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka delivering a manic soliloquy around our motto that technology changes, story doesn’t - and then taking a bite of a Wildlife chocolate bar? Or Tommy Shelby from Peaky Blinders as our Accounts Receivables guy - “invoice due Net 30 - by order of the Peaky f@#king Blinders!”