- Case Study
From Brief to OOH in 14 Days: A Campaign Walkthrough
A walkthrough of a real campaign that went from brief to live out-of-home in two weeks with no shoot day. Day-by-day, with notes on what compressed and what stayed the same.
- Case Study
Coca-Cola's AI Christmas Ad: Anatomy of a Backlash
Coca-Cola's 2024 holiday campaign updated the brand's iconic truck-driving-through-snow imagery using AI generation. The audience response was sharp and overwhelmingly negative. A specific look at why.
- Case Study
Klarna's All-AI Marketing Org: A Year In
In 2023-2024, Klarna restructured its marketing operations around AI tooling and announced major workforce reductions tied to the shift. Eighteen months later, the picture is more complicated than the headlines.
- Case Study
The Spotify Wrapped 2023 AI Personas: A Postmortem
Spotify's 2023 Wrapped campaign introduced AI-generated personality categories — Vampire, Alchemist, Hunter — into the year-end ritual. The campaign won short-term engagement and left behind a useful lesson about personalization at scale.
- Case Study
Toys R Us and OpenAI Sora: The First Brand Film That Actually Tried
In June 2024, Toys R Us released a brand short produced with OpenAI's Sora. The reception was mixed. The strategic reading is more interesting than the reception.
- Case Study
Wendy's FreshAI and the Operational AI Marketing Frontier
In 2023, Wendy's rolled out a voice-AI drive-through system with Google Cloud. The most interesting marketing AI work of the period was not about creative — it was about operations.
- Case Study
What Mango's All-AI Catalog Reveals About Product Photography
In 2024, Mango shipped a Sunset Dream collection campaign produced almost entirely with AI-generated models. The result was clean. The implications for e-commerce product photography were not.
- Case Study
Google Gemini's Image Pause: When the Big Player Got It Wrong
In February 2024, Google paused Gemini's image generation after the model produced historically inaccurate output. The episode taught the industry more about model fine-tuning failure modes than any case study from the previous year.
- Case Study
How "Now and Then" Used ML to Recover a 1977 John Lennon Demo
In November 2023, the Beatles released a new song built on a forty-six-year-old cassette demo. The technical story behind it is one of the cleanest cases for AI in creative production — and a useful counterexample to the slop conversation.
- Case Study
Marvel's Secret Invasion AI Title Sequence and the Disclosure Question
Marvel used AI to generate the opening title sequence of its 2023 series Secret Invasion. The artist community reacted with anger; the studio defended the choice. What the episode said about disclosure norms.
- Case Study
The Levi's + Lalaland.ai Controversy: What It Got Wrong
In March 2023, Levi's announced a partnership with Lalaland.ai to generate AI models for its e-commerce imagery. The backlash was instructive — not for the reasons most coverage suggested.
- Case Study
Drake, the Weeknd, and the 2023 AI Music Controversy
In April 2023, a fake Drake-and-Weeknd duet generated using AI voice synthesis went viral, charted, and then was pulled. The episode set the template for how labels, platforms, and artists would handle AI for the next two years.
- Case Study
What Coca-Cola's "Create Real Magic" Got Right About Branded AI
In early 2023, Coca-Cola opened its archive to an AI co-creation platform. The campaign attracted criticism, but the structural decisions were ahead of where most brands have landed since.