Over the past few months everyone has been going crazy about how good Ai is and its capabilities. Industry leaders, tech leaders, celebrities, and every news channel in the world are all talking about Ai especially since the launch of Chat GPT and DALL:E (both developed by Open Ai). This pivotal moment in time has been compared to the “invention of the Guttenberg press” or “invention of photography” by many thought leaders. But soon after the initial awe subsided about what these tools could do for us, a collective angst developed about what they could to us. People feel threatened, that AI is becoming so good, it could impact everything from our jobs to life as we know it.

Hardee’s youthful, tongue-in-cheek attitude has come to represent its challenger brand stance in the world of fast-food hamburger giants. And just as we often had, when everyone zigged, we zagged.

We decided to put AI to the test to see just how good it really is, see if it was the genius everyone purports to be and whether it really was a threat to our collective futures, all while putting Hardee’s at the center of it all.

Hardee’s flagship burger- the Super Star burger- has long been an iconic, mouthwatering ambassador of our brand and our pride and joy. So could this all-capable AI out matchup to our Superstar?

We have long vied for the attention of everyone’s (most importantly our Goliath competitors’) most desirable target, Gen Z. Although we could provide no match to their mammoth media spends, we knew we could earn their attention- and their love- by talking to them in their language; the language of online trends. And what trend was bigger than using AI to recreate themselves?

So while they were using AI to create hundreds of images in their likeness, we used AI to create thousands in ours, and prove that even AI couldn’t re-imagine the Super Star burger

Using Open AI’s image making tool DALL:E, we prompted it to “imagine Hardee’s SUPER STAR burger”. What came back was an array of weird, wacky, surreal, completely wild creations – amazing, near misses, beautiful images, but crucially – not one was a 100% correct image of a SUPER STAR burger.

So, we pushed it farther with other prompts including giving the full recipe. We gave it over 10,000 chance, but it still couldn’t nail it down.

We then made a campaign from the results – images of all the mistakes AI generated, became social posts, alongside a video showing the fuller experiment with an encouraging message to remind people its OK, Ai isn’t perfect, so don’t worry right now.

Our campaign struck a chord with audiences garnering us over 620K engagements, 9.9 million impressions with a organic reach of 23%, which is 4 times the industry average. In fact our video content performed 600% higher than industry average with a view-through-rate of 73%.

But best of all, it reflected directly on the business. We reminded everyone of our unmatchable Super Star and got mouths watering, selling 38.5% more during the campaign period than during the same period last year.