Situation: Virgin Voyages needed to increase online bookings and knew that deepfakes and Gen AI were dominating the cultural conversation.

Brief: To get people cruising.

Objectives: We set out to break through with a film that introduced Jen AI — a first-of-its-kind AI trained to speak by pre-existing clips and a 9000 word script read by Jennifer Lopez. The spoken clips were fed to a second AI-trained model to assure that “Jen’s” facial features and mouth looked realistic while speaking. Jen AI continued to learn more names, allowing thousands of users to create video invites sent from “Jennifer Lopez” to their family and friends, in which she addressed both senders and recipients by their first names. User inputs triggered API calls to generate audio, select deepfake clips and compile videos with sound design in under a minute. The experience was intended to increase awareness, consideration, and conversion for the brand.

The idea was designed to earn the attention of our target by jumping in on the GenAI conversation to develop Jen AI — an AI version of Jennifer Lopez with the ability to invite people to book a Virgin Voyages cruise. Jen AI allowed users to send customized, bookable video invitations in which “Jen” addressed both senders and recipients by their first names to make it appear as though they were being personally invited by the celebrity.

Through market research, we discovered that our ages 18 to 54 target had been deeply affected by the pandemic and had stopped taking cruises. We wanted to bring them back to cruising but knew it would require more breakthrough than simply asking them. So we had Jennifer Lopez do it. Because of Jennifer Lopez’s own life experience, sense of humor and celebratory take on life, we knew that finding a way for her to directly invite people back to our ships would be persuasive. To do this, we introduced Jen AI — an AI version of Jennifer Lopez. Users could visit VirginVoyages.com/JenAI to create their own personalized invites that they could send to their family and friends via text, email or social media “from Jennifer.” Invites were bookable and asked all recipients to come aboard for premium, customized itineraries.

Implementing deepfake and AI-driven lip sync models, we created Jen AI — an AI Jennifer Lopez with the power to directly and individually invite people everywhere to cruise. To introduce Jen AI, we created a launch film that drove viewers to a website where they could interact and build invites with Jen AI. The film and the accompanying content garnered 20 million organic impressions and 2 billion earned media impressions, leading to 76,000 bookings. Jen AI and Virgin Voyages cruises were advertised through film, social media, banner ads and on our owned media.

30,000 invites were created using Jen AI, and the campaign, which included a film, social content, and online ads, received 20 million organic social impressions, 2 billion earned impressions, and led to 76,000 bookings.

People who had previously reported having no time to book group holidays returned to cruising in droves. Awareness and consideration both increased, leading to conversion.

Virgin Voyages has since been seen as a cutting-edge and culturally relevant brand that offers customization and personalization that exceeds that of other cruise lines.