Toys “R” Us released one of the “first-ever” artificial intelligence generated brand ads — and people are both impressed and skeptical.
The toy company partnered with creative agency, Native Foreign, to make the ad using OpenAI’s text-to-video tool, Sora, which is not widely available to the public. The ad depicts the toy company’s late founder, Charles Lazarus, as a child dreaming of the store, and features the company’s mascot, Geoffrey the Giraffe.
“Charles Lazarus was a visionary ahead of his time and we wanted to honor his legacy with a spot using the most cutting-edge technology available,” Kim Miller Olko, Toys “R” Us global chief marketing officer, said in a statement. “Our brand embraces innovation and the emotional appeal of Toys ‘R’ Us to connect with consumers in unexpected ways.”
Nik Kleverov, chief creative officer at Native Foreign, said Sora allowed the teams to make the ad “with remarkable speed and efficiency.” Using Sora, Toys “R” Us Studios and Native Foreign were able to make the ad “in just a few weeks, condensing hundreds of iterative shots down to a couple dozen,” the companies said. While the ad was almost entirely created using the AI video tool, the teams also used corrective VFX and originally composed music.
Allen T., an AI video-maker and educator shared the ad on X, pointing out with other users that the video generator still needs improvement with generating hands, and that Lazarus’s depictions were different throughout the ad. Meanwhile, other users had mixed reactions, from calling the ad “awesome” and “dope,” to “Terrible and bad and awful” and “brand murder.”
The Toys “R” Us ad comes at a time when creative industries (and many others) are grappling with how the emergence of generative AI will impact their work.
The use of AI was a focal part of the Hollywood writers’ strike last summer. The deal reached between writers and studios included not permitting AI to “write or rewrite literary material,” not considering AI-generated writing as “source material,” and not forcing writers to use AI in their work unless they want to.
However, Kleverov said in a statement that both the creative industry and the toy store are “experiencing a renaissance, and that the company was “the perfect brand to embrace this AI-forward strategy.”