Toys ‘R’ Us pioneers text to video AI-generated advertising clip
Toys ‘R’ Us is the first to use OpenAI’s Sora to create a promo, signalling a new norm for marketing.
Company founder Charles Lazarus showcased Toys ‘R’ Us AI-generated short promotional clip at the 2024 Cannes Lions Festival in France. In an effort to regenerate interest in the brand, Lazarus collaborated with the creative agency Native Foreign using OpenAI’s Sora. Except for a few tweaks that require human input the 66-seconds video was created entirely by Sora.
Sora is a diffusion model capable of three modes of video creation. In addition to using text prompts to create videos, it is capable of extending, modifying and filling in missing frames in an existing video. For instance, it can take a video with static noise and gradually transform it by removing the noise over many steps. The AI model can also animate elements in an image.
Company CMO, Kim Miller, informed festival attendees that despite the film’s AI base, production required human involvement throughout the process, including a dependence on intuition. The film received mixed reviews on social media, with some even calling it creepy.
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