MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA: Google is swapping “vanilla” tech tools for Veo 3, and urging consumers to do the same.
To promote its AI-powered Pixel 10 smartphone, Google premiered Vanilla, a campaign imagining a world where industry-standard smartphones were replaced with vanilla soft serve cones. The spot shows cones strapped into selfie sticks, stuck on dashboards for driver navigation and held up by Louvre visitors to “snap photos” of the Mona Lisa.
The ad premiered on September 23 as Google’s newest extension of the 2017-launched Ask More of Your Phone campaign. Since its premiere, the spot has amassed 10.5 million views across TikTok, YouTube and Instagram.
“The goal is to gently nudge people and wake them up to the sea of sameness they’ve become used to with their phones,” Jesse Juriga, Google Creative Lab’s senior director and executive creative director, told Campaign. “We like to create ads that have insight but feel playful at the same time — this acknowledges how people are feeling in a cheeky way.” (Campaign is PRWeek’s sister business media brand at Haymarket Media).
In terms of urging consumers to ditch “vanilla” industry-standard tech tools, Google is practicing what it preaches. Vanilla was created with Veo, a text-to-video AI tool Google Creative Lab has been using for over nine months to create video and social projects, Juriga said.
‘Bananas’ pitches & AI sandwiches
“I don’t think we would have made this ad two years ago without Veo,” Juriga explained. “As a creative director, if someone brought this pitch to me, it would have been hard to see — but Veo bridges the gap for creatives who sometimes have bananas ideas that are hard to articulate with words or by using past references in a deck.”
For its Vanilla and Just Ask Google campaigns, Google Creative Lab used Veo 3 to design storyboards with gritty details — set design and actors’ moods while interacting with advertised products, for example — and then hired human directors to transform the AI-generated storyboards into final spots. Director duo Matias & Mathias worked on Vanilla.
That’s the “AI sandwich” approach: layering human creativity with AI tools, rather than leaning fully into one or the other. As advertisers find the integration sweet spot amid rapid AI development, they’ve been criticized when AI integration overpowers human connection — take Coca-Cola’s virally criticized Holidays Are Coming ad.
“You had creatives spitting out hundreds of ideas — all really prolific, as they always have been, but without Veo, there was less fidelity,” Juriga said. “Then you hire an amazing director to make sure there’s unexpectedness, humanity and some more storytelling; and on the other end have the editing team bring it to life.”
Google Creative Lab used Veo 2 at the start of Vanilla’s creation, and the tool evolved into Veo 3 before the spot was complete. Despite AI tools’ momentous metamorphosis rates, they aren’t capable of creating quality advertisements without human intervention or the assistance of other AI tools yet, Juriga explained.
Juriga described Veo “misunderstanding” prompts and visualizing actors holding ice cream cones and phones at the same time, instead of replacing phones with cones. Google Creative Studios solved the problem using an AI editing tool, Imagen, to create images of humans holding ice cream cones like phones to train Veo.
“It’s like volleyball back-and-forth,” Juriga explained. “There’s a lot of craft and nuance in prompting Veo 3 — it forces you to be really specific really early, which is actually helpful when you go into production, having that detailed clarification with directors instead of deciding things such as, ‘what time of day is it?’ or ‘what are the actors wearing?’ on set later.”
Google Creative Lab hasn’t changed its staff count as a result of integrating AI into its workflow, Juriga said, explaining, “It’s the same amount of people, but they’re being more prolific.” Less than five creatives solidified Vanilla’s concept, but the “amount of humans gets quite big” during spots’ production stages, Juriga added.
“I’ve been doing this for 20 years, and there’s never been as big of a difference in how my team has created and ideated projects than in the last six or seven months,” Juriga said of Veo 3’s play in Vanilla. “It feels like jet fuel for the creative process. The creatives and filmmakers embracing these things can get their stories, weirdness and quirkiness out in a way people can understand better — and that’s the point, right? Getting an idea out of your head and letting people laugh.”
This story first appeared on Campaign US.