Lunchables is a brand that’s been feeding kids’ creativity for years. Our strategy is to “power kid creativity,” and all our advertising reflects this insight.

In previous work for the brand, we had shown kids how to stack and build with our original Lunchables product, but our new product, Lunchables Dunkables, was made specifically for dipping—no building required. It’s a snack designed for kids to dip and unleash their creativity to create unique combinations. So we needed to find a way to showcase the imagination of kids and inspire them to get creative with our new product, as well.

A.I. has taken over the world in just a few years: Students write essays with ChatGPT. Artists create beautiful images in Midjourney.

As a brand that believes in empowering kids, we needed to bring the conversation back to kid creativity. After all, A.I. is great for beautiful images, but unlike kids, it can’t imagine anything for itself. We tested this theory by asking ChatGPT: Are kids more creative than A.I.? The answer? “Yes, kids are more creative than A.I.”

And when we held focus groups for kids to try new Lunchables Dunkables, we noticed that they imagined our pretzel twists as magic swords or our mozza sticks as yellow submarines in a marinara sea. They didn’t just eat the snacks; they imagined universes with them.

So to launch Dunkables, we decided to use our product to prove that Kid Imagination was more powerful than A.I.

We decided to run a social experiment: A.I. vs. K.I. (Kid Imagination).

We partnered with Getty’s Generative AI, obtaining a subscription through its early beta testing. This allowed us to use up to 12,000 A.I.-generated images, all fully licensed.

Then we gave A.I. and kids the exact same prompt: Imagine our food as something fantastical.

The kids drew pretzel ninjas fighting peanut-butter-spewing dragons, a narwhal made of mozzarella, and more—while the A.I. couldn’t “imagine” anything but food.

We documented the experiment and released it online, encouraging kids across the country to participate by sending their own artwork.

We turned the artwork into a public art exhibition, displaying the A.I. and K.I. images outside America’s most popular museums—like the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and the Contemporary Austin-Jones Center in Austin—proving that nothing out-imagines kids. Not even A.I.

“Wow, AI doesn’t have a chance against kids’ imagination.”

—CBS

The A.I. vs. K.I. campaign was a success, garnering coverage from CBS, Trend Hunter, Ad Age, Yahoo! Finance and other outlets.

In addition to the press, the campaign generated 116 million media impressions, with 100% positive online sentiment. And in just four months, the new product hit 1.6 million in sales, outselling the top competitor in the category.

The most important outcome of all: we proved that nothing out-imagines kids. Not even A.I.