How Emotive brought Ultimate’s luxury proposition to life using AI
When Emotive received the latest brief from yoghurt brand Ultimate, it faced two major barriers — a tight timeline and a tight budget. With only two weeks to deliver a large-format OOH campaign, traditional production methods were well off the table.
However, through its new specialist AI unit, it was able to bring the positioning of “championing modern moments of indulgence” to life. Emotive’s CEO, Simon Joyce, and ACD, Edward Macaulay, said they not only met the brief, but worked to elevate the brand, through renaissance-style visuals.
“Ultimate is all about this idea of savouring something decadent,” Joyce told Mumbrella. “It’s sweet, it’s rich, and that led us to this idea called ‘So Luxurious’, where Ultimate is so decadent and indulgent that you want to eat it in a more luxurious and elegant way.”
Over the conceptualisation phase, Emotive “had a bit of fun” with headlines, according to Macaulay: “Ideas were things like ‘so luxurious you’d call your couch a chaise longue’ or ‘so luxurious you’ll raise your pinky’.”
But shooting those ideas in a timeline of two weeks was not possible.
“To go from shooting, to retouching, getting it out on the buses, even by the time you go through casting, agreements, the process of working with the client, it just wouldn’t work. You’re talking four to eight weeks minimum as a full-scale production,” Macaulay told Mumbrella.
These barriers made the agency consider how they could achieve this via AI, so it tapped into its recently developed task force. Senior designer Christopher Cooper, who is among the AI unit, suggested generating renaissance-style oil paintings to bring the “elegance” to life.
With a background in illustration and a deep understanding of design composition, Cooper had already been upskilling in generative tools. He saw a way to build bespoke visuals using AI, with complete creative control, including over brushstroke, lighting, and composition.
“ Rather than us just turning to AI, where quite often people think you just plug it in and go, in this case, we were leaning on the expertise of our own designers to really land something quite special,” Macaulay said.
“Chris wasn’t just prompting an image generator,” he explained. “He was shaping and constructing the work using his own artistic sensibility – starting with just a background, then layering in individual elements like trees, drapes, even moonlight. The AI became a tool to enhance his craft, not replace it.”
The process began with prototyping. Over two days, the team developed a series of test images based off Cooper’s parameters set in ChatGPT. Pretty quickly, Emotive was able to make a master low-res image to take to the client.
They then passed the low-res images onto a retoucher, who used another AI tool — Magnific AI — to upscale it for large-format OOH executions. This step was crucial, according to Macaulay, to ensure the visuals would hold up when displayed on large buses and billboards.
“One of the big issues with AI imagery is scale,” he said. “What looks great on a phone can fall apart on a billboard.”
And while AI will often trying to perfect every little detail, he said the beauty of oil paintings actually lies in the little imperfections. So they kept some of the small quirks, but still made sure to avoid the “uncanny valley”. On the flip side, they wanted to make sure it didn’t try to pass as being something real.
“From the brief, conceptualising this, we weren’t trying to trick people into thinking it was real,” Joyce told Mumbrella. “This creative will stand out, it’s different, but it doesn’t cross that line. I understand people have different views on this, but it’s clearly not supposed to be real, it’s an oil painting.”
He said they avoided crossing the line because when audiences start asking if something is real or AI, that’s when all emotional connection is lost: “We’re all wired to human connection, and human connection needs something to be real. And this doesn’t take us into that space.”
The campaign is one of the first large-format OOH executions we know to be AI-generated. For Emotive, it underscores a broader shift in how agencies are, and can, use AI — not to replace humans, but to expand creative possibilities.
“We’re all in on AI,” Joyce said. “But it’s never about automation. It’s about bringing our purpose of ‘ideas that change how people feel’ to life.”
Keep up to date with the latest in media and marketing
Got a tip?
Lauren McNamara is the associate editor at Mumbrella, covering the agency beat. She joined in November 2022 as editorial assistant, after completing a Bachelor of Communications (Journalism) at UTS.
Linkedin
Have your say