Why use AI?
U.S. Bank decided to go with Supernatural AI to fast-track the creative and use the agency’s technology. The company has worked with McCann since 2020, and the agency is still on the U.S. Bank roster. Lacorazza said the bank works with multiple agencies for different purposes.
“We had a desire to get to market very quickly … and an efficiency play was a big part of this,” said Lacorazza.
U.S. Bank also wanted to try something new in its marketing, and using AI was an opportunity to pressure-test the new technology.
The AI used in the campaign wasn’t on the creative end. Supernatural AI came up with the creative concept, but it didn’t use AI for visual creation. Instead, the technology was used for strategy. U.S. Bank fed its data into Supernatural AI’s tech stack, and the data was turned into avatars for the customer segments and customer profiles it wanted to go after. Essentially, it was an AI version of focus groups, and it led to testing against synthetic audiences.
The rapid-fire testing through AI was able to whittle down the versions of the creative in a very short period of time, relative to human testing, which can take weeks.
The AI came about in the mid-stage process of the campaign, allowing the creative development to accelerate once it got to the human process of making decisions on the creative and adding the human elements, like the talent and the imagery. The whole process ended up taking less than four months, which Lacorazza said is astonishing, especially for a big bank that sometimes has lengthened processes.
“The name of the game for this first brand campaign was all about speed,” said Mike Barrett, chief strategy officer and co-founder of Supernatural AI. “Processes that usually take weeks, or even months, we are able to complete in a matter of days thanks to the platform we’ve built.”
Barrett continued that Supernatural AI accelerates the strategy and creative process so that its people can bring to life its clients’ visions, as it did for U.S. Bank.
Lacorazza offered some advice about brands working with AI, saying that they should “think about how you can leverage the technology to enable humans to be better at what they do, versus replacing them … In our space, human creativity is really important.” He also recommended that companies experiment with the technology, because they won’t understand it unless they work with it.
U.S. Bank has already rolled out two ads in the campaign and released versions in Spanish, as it has a large presence in the Hispanic market, especially after it merged with Union Bank last year in California, doubling its presence in the state.
Two more ads are coming in the next few weeks, along with other executional elements, social and digital and more. Lacorazza said there will be moments in the future when the bank has new product announcements, and it will pick those moments to create new work following the same creative platform.
