AI is continuing to proliferate the marketing scene in 2023, with the McDonald’s Lunar New Year ad being the most recent benefactor of AI-generated visuals.
According to Marketing Dive, McDonalds collaborated with Karen X Cheng, an author and digital designer, to create an ad that uses something called neural radiance fields—affectionately abbreviated to “NeRF”—to generate a 3D environment via AI.
The ad in question explores a freeze-frame of a family eating at a McDonald’s while Cheng narrates the scene, explaining the significance of Lunar New Year to her while the camera pans about and then goes into the food bag on the table, emerging on the “other side” of the bag in a brand-new scene that features Cheng in the flesh.
When the ad ends, a QR code that links to other aspects of the campaign—including an AR filter celebrating the transition into the Year of the Rabbit on Instagram—appears on a pedestal. Reportedly, other elements of the campaign include “3D sculptures” of the 12 animals that are representative of different years.
Cheng herself graced the metaverse in which all of these campaign pieces take place as well, joining virtually via an avatar on February 2nd.
The interesting thing about all of this is that, as impossible as the visuals themselves actually are (unless someone out there really has traveled through a McDonald’s happy meal bag wormhole into an alternate reality), the NeRF technology is extremely convincing; the scenes themselves look real enough, and while it’s clear that some digital trickery has been used, AI generation is not the punchline at which one would be expected to arrive when viewing the ad.
Of course, it’s worth noting that McDonalds is just the latest to use AI in an advertising spot. Marketing Dive reports that Ryan Reynolds’ most recent Mint Mobile ad was “partially scripted” by ChatGPT, and more and more companies are finding themselves participating in what many refer to as a “metaverse” of digital and AI-generated content.
As the future of advertising unfolds in front of consumers, it may very well become impossible for most to discern between fact and fiction as far as AI goes.
