The Lexus ES is a luxury saloon car drawing on AI to create an unrivalled driving experience. It reads the inputs of the road ahead, and the world around it, sensing what the driver is feeling and responding. It is a smart machine that feels almost alive and intuitive.

This theme of intuition became a key idea and the benefits it confers was used as the seed for data driven creative development. The concept came from a very simple thought. If Lexus, a leader in AI, could train a car to read inputs from the world around it, could we do something similar in the creative process.

The AI would be used for the creation of a script. It would plot the sequence of actions and events to occur within the advert which would then be shot in collaboration with a human director. Man and machine working together.

The Lexus ES is an ‘intuitive’ car, it uses A.I to work with the driver for a safer and more pleasurable drive. The initial idea (from a human) was to mimic this relationship and have man and machine work together to create an intuitive advert. The A.I. would write the script and a human would direct it. The A.I was trained via analysing thousands of data points. This included 15 years of Cannes car & luxury ads, Unruly emotional data, Lexus brand data and primary data from a commissioned experiment on intuition by the University of New South Wales. The resulting A.I script was a story about a machine coming to life. The script was not altered and was shot exactly as dictated by the A.I. by Oscar winner Kevin Macdonald.

One of the concepts from the brief was that the car would be particularly appealing to individuals who possess a strong sense of intuition. Therefore one of the key elements of the academic study was to identify the preferences of intuitive individuals, over and above those of the wider population in order to optimise the advert for this viewer segment.

A number of key findings such as the importance of creating an emotional experience, that the advert should be more about the product as a whole than a run-down of features and details, the avoidance of unnecessary on screen text and the additional level of excitement which can be drawn on scenes shot at night time.

A number of issues were encountered such as some of the preliminary output being very much orientated towards a more mass marketing proposition than was appropriate for the brand in question. To improve this we also added a number of Cannes Lion award winning adverts from luxury brands from other sectors and brand guideline detail.

This transformed the advert into work much more representative of the brand, albeit still very different from prior work.

To help the AI we trained it with a comprehensive set of data that would aid it in its creation of a script for an intuitive car ad for intuitive people.

Data came from a number of sources including Cannes Lion adverts, adverts measured as having a high emotional index score, academic data around intuition and expert input around the psychology of intuition and the creative process.

To process this data we included a number of new techniques. The main one used AI drive scene detection to tag relevant moments and objects in the films it viewed. For example, being able to tag cars or humans. In addition, we developed a process which allowed the AI to classify huge volumes of information in a short space of time.

This resulted in a vast archive of data from the adverts. AI was then used to identify commonalities of award winning and high emotional index adverts.

This generated two outputs; a detailed account of the people, objects, actions and locations which should occur in our advert (the script). The second was a list of ‘success criteria,’ the non-narrative elements the data indicated would create successful outcomes such as strong use of facial expressions.

The final script was then given to the director Kevin Macdonald who shot the 60” film, exactly as the AI had written it.

The final film was shown across Europe in a number of ATL and BTL mediums; Cinema, TV, Social and online.

The advert itself has generated substantial PR value of around €2m+ thanks to the unique way in which it was created, reaching 25 countries through 114 articles. Sky news aired a 5 minute special on the adverts use of A.I.

It also demonstrated further thought leadership on the part of the manufacturer into the practical uses of AI within their products, making use of such technologies already. It certainly got the industry talking about how and when AI should be applied to the creative process.

More than that though the campaign has been an incredible sales success with some markets fulfilling orders for the year, within the first two months of the campaign. In one market, the UK, you’d now need to wait until August if you wanted to order a Lexus ES.

In addition, the campaign has helped Lexus see a 76% uplift in search traffic across key markets, with over 400,000 new visitors arriving at the Lexus ES website. On average these users have been spending 5m 12secs with the brand because of this campaign, a huge increase on the usual website average of 2mins.