Get More Christmas than You Bargained for at Cribbs Shopping Complex

Four years post Covid, and with the gentle easing of austerity and a slow recovery in the economy, there is a growing sense across the UK that this could be the first Christmas in several years where many people feel more encouraged and able to truly get stuck into the festive season.

It was this thought that inspired the idea behind Cribbs’ recent Christmas campaign – 'More Christmas than you bargained for' – a light-hearted, amusing, and slightly offbeat take on the concept of going big for Christmas with your friends and family. The three concepts show oversized items – a giant present being squeezed into a car, an enlarged angel on a tree, and a supersized Christmas pudding on a table setting – all larger than life and made to look mildly ridiculous against their regular settings.

What made this campaign particularly interesting was that each of the three concepts was created using generative AI - briefed and overseen by true's creative team, with production handled by Digital da Vincis.

Creating a campaign in this way, meant Nick and the true team could create a multi-shot, multi-location campaign and generate life-like assets, that otherwise would have been outside the campaign budget. This approach gave the visuals scale and stand out, but the process also came with valuable lessons.

The ubiquitous challenge that creative teams face with Gen AI is that it cannot take direction like a human can. Trying to convey a sense of struggle through the facial expression, in this instance, where a man is squeezing a giant present into a vehicle that is clearly too small, the nuance is too subtle for the machine to fully grasp, preventing it from generating an appropriate response.

Although the production process was lengthier with this campaign, AI proved to be a valuable tool alongside other creative disciplines, to help craft visuals with scale and impact, and ultimately create a campaign that our client loves. 

Nick Horne, true’s CD, shares his comments about the campaign process, “We’re still very early in the development of text-to-image AI and there are clearly instances where AI is not the right direction to go, but at the same time, it provides another tool in our armoury that affords us the potential to achieve results that would otherwise be out of reach. This was a great example where we simply could not afford to have multiple locations with set dressing and props for each and whilst not perfect, AI opens new worlds, where before there were closed doors.”

The campaign will run across OOH, social and digital display assets, as well as being supported by a radio ad, this December.