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. can be a powerful tool to enhance the imagination, but people are worried that it could kill jobs, stifle originality and hold kids back.

We wanted to provide reassurance that A.I will never out-imagine kids in a way that kept Dunkables front and center. We tested this theory by asking ChatGPT, Are kids more creative than A.I.? The answer? “Yes, kids are more creative than A.I.”

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 mozzarella narwhal and more—while A.I. couldn’t “imagine” anything but food.

We turned the kids’ stories into our whole campaign, creating billboards, TV spots and a public art exhibit out of them. And kids were involved in the entire process from start to finish, to ensure every element was powered by K.I.

We held focus groups to let kids try our new product and discovered that their imaginations ran wild with it. As they ate, they envisioned our pretzel twists as magic swords stuck in peanut butter, or our mozza sticks as submarines in a marinara sea. They didn’t just eat our snack; they imagined entire universes with it.

Our opportunity was to turn snack time into creative time, with our product as a catalyst for kids to “dip” into their imagination. We wanted Dunkables to center the power of kid imagination and use kids’ ideas to drive and inspire the campaign.

We started referring to kid imagination as “K.I.”—which immediately unlocked a clear enemy for the brand to push against. Therefore, we set out to prove that the most powerful creative tool on the planet isn’t A.I., but K.I.

We took actual stories from kids and used them as inspiration for our billboard and poster campaign.

To bring their ideas to life, we built huge, practical sets—like an underwater sea world for the mozza submarine, or a giant kids’ mountain, complete with a pretzel sword and peanut butter stone—to photograph for the visuals.

And kids were involved in the process from start to finish. We used their input for all the elements, from the ketchup and ranch rings around the chicken planet, to the tomato jellyfish in the ocean. We fed their ideas to our designers, creating exactly what the kids had in their heads, to ensure every element was powered by K.I.

The artwork appeared everywhere, from posters to billboards to online banners—even in a TV spot.

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

—CBS

The 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 over 200 million media impressions, with 99% positive online sentiment. And in just four months, the new product hit 1.6 million in sales, outselling the top competitor in the category.