For our 2023 Christmas campaign, we thought we’d do something a little different. We gathered our team for some brainstorming sessions and put on our best thinking caps!
Of course, we could take a look back at our previous campaigns – Eon’s Creative Christmas Ideas (Part 1 and Part 2) and Eon’s Festive AR – and see if we could create an interactive advent calendar or a festive animation. But instead, we wanted to put AI to the ultimate yuletide test!
With the use of AI tools rising, we wanted to see how practical it is to use, and whether or not it has what it takes to take on Christmas…
With a team full of creatives, good ideas are not hard to come by. Our videographers and animators are great at putting ideas out there for us all to bounce off and when AI Christmas jokes were mentioned, we were sold! There’s nothing cheesier than a Christmas cracker joke, but can AI rival the Christmas dinner giggles when we pull our crackers over Turkey and sprouts? Let’s take a look…
Setting up…
After initial discussions, our creative videographers worked to set up our studio ready for filming. You might have seen those videos of celebrities reading mean tweets about themselves…this is where we got some of our inspiration! We kept the set up relatively simple, with a clean white backdrop and single chair. We used two cameras with bright lighting to get footage from two different angles so we could capture people’s raw reactions after reading the jokes. One camera was locked off on a tripod and the other was a closer shot to add a more personal and informal feel to the video.
The beauty of having such a great team of videographers, designers and marketers meant everyone could work together to create the assets we need. Will, one of our designers, designed a graphic for use on cue cards, which we had printed by Springfield Solutions.
Using AI…
The AI-generated jokes were top secret and were only known by Dawid, our videographer who was filming, and Dave, one of our web developers. Between the two of them, they used ChatGPT to generate Christmas jokes. First, we inputted people’s roles and asked the tool to create jokes with a Christmas twist. The guys wanted to get the perfect jokes, so they had to regenerate the jokes a couple of times. After this, they asked AI to add a more human touch and in the style of certain comedians. They also made some more specific jokes based on people’s personalities.
Filming…
As mentioned, the filming was totally secret…people waited patiently in the office to be called up for filming, eagerly anticipating the jokes!
We wanted the video to have a bit of a behind the scenes feel, so Dawid asked each person to come in, take a seat and introduce themselves and their role. Each team member had two personalised jokes, as well as eleven generic jokes that the whole team would read. We wanted to showcase people’s authentic and first-hand reactions to the jokes, so they were encouraged to just be themselves! At the end, they were asked for their thoughts on the jokes and how they thought AI performed…
So what did we think?
Overall, people were quite disappointed with the jokes, but after all, isn’t Christmas a time for cheesy, corny jokes?! Our team all noticed that the AI jokes still lacked that human element and felt very robotic and static, but that makes for great filming! A lot of the team noted that they would use AI as pointer for ideas, rather than creating an end-product. We’d be interested to see how far AI grows in the next year, so keep an eye on our socials in 2024!
