NotCo is a food company that uses artificial intelligence to replicate foods like milk, burgers, and chicken. By analyzing plants on a molecular level, the artificial intelligence can create recipes that taste exactly the same as the animal-based product.

51% of people who try plant-based foods don’t buy them again because they don’t taste as good as their animal counterparts. So our brief was to raise awareness about NotCo and convince skeptics that NotCo can make plant-based products that taste indistinguishable from the real thing with the use of artificial intelligence. If we do that, we can encourage trial of NotCo products. And if our target tries NotCo products, and delivers on taste expectations, we will have repeat buyers.

To promote their plant-based products, NotCo created a radio campaign that features human voices that might or might not sound familiar. At first, it sounded like these humans were endorsing NotCo’s products. But in reality, these voices were generated by artificial intelligence, just like NotCo’s plant-based food is made.

By showing how hard it is to tell the difference between the real voice and AI-generated voice, we showed that NotCo’s plant-based food and animal food are indistinguishable from one another. And we did all of this with a talent budget of $0.

In the same way that NotCo’s plant-based products are created by artificial intelligence, we created announcer voices with AI. We created three radio ads featuring three different voices. All of them were not real people. The casting process for the AI-generated voices involved getting A.I. technology to help us recreate indistinguishably human-sounding voices that people might or might not be familiar with when hearing our radios.

Once the human voices were selected, the next step would be to use artificial intelligence to generate the voices. We trained an AI model to generate new audio clips that sound like the human is speaking.The AI-generated audio clips would then be edited and mixed with the rest of the radio ad content to create the final product.

The radios launched in commercial breaks in podcasts on Earth Day (April 22), a day when the conversation about environmental impact and sustainability were trending in the news, media, and pop culture. This aligned with NotCo’s brand mission to create food that’s good for people and for the planet by reducing the CO2 emissions of producing our products.

We targeted environmentally conscious vegans and vegetarians who would resonate with NotCo’s brand mission: to create food that’s good for people and good for the planet, reducing the environmental impact. Our approach was to establish NotCo products as indistinguishable from animal-based products by showing how powerful artificial intelligence is these days.

NotCo’s “NotPeople” campaign used a completely new kind of technology to show that artificial intelligence is so advanced these days that it can replicate the voice of real people and make it indistinguishable from the real thing. Just like how NotCo’s plant-based food tastes exactly like its animal-based products. The radio campaign raised awareness about what NotCo is, educated people how their plant-based food is made, and established NotCo’s environmental sustainability mission.