Toys "R" Us, the American toy, clothing, and baby product retailer, has created the first big brand advertising generated entirely with AI.
Since the rise of generative AI technology, things like this is predicted to happen eventually. Soon, companies would start developing ads using the technology, due to how fast and easy it is, and cheaper, to create a content. And Toys "R" Us is the first one to do it.
The company has created the first brand film to made entirely with OpenAI's Sora.
In the announcement, Toys "R" Us Studios and Native Foreign use OpenAI's Sora to narrate the origin story of the brand.
Toys "R" Us was founded in April 1948, by Charles P. Lazarus a baby-furniture retailer in Washington, D.C. during the postwar baby boom.
Its first mascot, Geoffrey the Giraffe, or also known as "Dr. G. Raffe," made its first appearance in the 1950s, and had its name appeared in many of the company's presence for more than a decade. The mascot also served as a "spokesanimal" for the brand.
And here, the Sora-made short film, tells an imagined story of Lazarus, and Geoffrey the Giraffe.
The short film was premiered during the 2024 Cannes Lions Festival, showcasing it to an audience of brand and advertising industry leaders at an exclusive LBB Beach event in France.
It was after all, in the late 1940s, where Lazarus was inspired by his generation of service members who, like himself, returned from World War II, got married, and began having children.
Lazarus began selling cradles and cribs, before realizing that many of his customers were parents who were looking for new toys because their children got bored of the old ones.
During the 1950s, he began exploring the idea of opening a new store dedicated to toys, which were more profitable, rather than children's furniture.
A film created solely by AI is predicted.
Despite the concepts and ideas behind it is human, Toys "R" Us becomes the first major company that experiments with using the technology, and let its brand image be controlled by AI.
Previously, OpenAI has reportedly been pitching Hollywood, and the first brand that publicly puts its interest, is brand management firm WHP Global, which licenses the Toys "R" Us brand to various stores.
While using generative AI to create a content can be as easy as typing in a query, there is much more to involve in this Toys "R" Us advertisement.
According to Native Foreign, the creative agency that produced the footage, the team had "about a dozen people" working on the video, and applied "corrective VFX" on top, explained director Nik Kleverov.
"Everything you see was created with text but some shots came together quicker than others; some took more iterations," he said.
"The blocking, the way the character looks, what they’re wearing, the emotion, the background – it has to be a perfect dance. Sometimes you would create something that was almost right and other times not so right."
Sora "got us about 80-85% of the way there," he wrote on X: