Outrun Obsolete

How we used a pinch of AI to deliver a unique and creative campaign

Pax8 are quietly taking the world by storm. As an online marketplace for IT cloud services, they save MSPs time and money by selling services from multiple vendors in one place. Not only that, but they provide insights, support and world-class expertise, helping their clients optimise their business and client service.

Pax8 partnered with us to create a highly personalised campaign for prospective new accounts. After they had carefully segmented their audience and buyer groups, we worked together to create a concept and bespoke tailored messaging.

Outrun obsolete!

Together, we identified a common message for their individual customer groups. They all wanted to stay ahead of the curve. This led to the concept of helping them ‘outrun obsolete’.

We were tasked to visualise unique figures for each customer persona, leaving their world of confused billing, disorganised account handling and chaotic work practices behind as they enter a peaceful, positive future with Pax8.

The challenge

The design challenge was to create a range of characters. Each character would walk away from chaos but with their own style and personas. Rather than producing a costly and time-consuming photo shoot to create this imagery, we leaned into the offerings of AI technology.

After consultation with Pax8, we used AI to create the characters and angles needed for the campaign. We could then adapt the images for each customer group to work for the range of visuals needed. These characters were then heavily illustrated to form bespoke ‘characters’ that we then took back into Ai to create our own landscapes and controlled outcomes.

Act fast, learn fast

We’ve learnt to simply use AI like any other tool. When managed carefully, it can enhance our productivity and benefit our clients and our team. 

Using different tools means we can work more efficiently, for example, automating certain tasks such as resizing images. It also allows us, as designers, to think bigger, giving us more opportunity to scope out concepts. Not only that, but on this occasion our client received their work faster.

AI can create complex, innovative design visuals that can be challenging to achieve manually. This allows us to push the boundaries, giving our clients more impactful outcomes.
Importantly, we’re adding AI into our repertoire as yet another tool in our arsenal. It’s not replacing creativity and flair. It’s simply another method for delivering strong concepts, visuals, and efficient final products.

AI isn’t a magic bullet…

As powerful as AI can be, it’s no wunderkind.

Quality first. For one, quality control matters more than ever when you’re using AI design tools. In the same way as we’d review the work created by another member of the team, we pay close attention to the output. For instance, in this project, some renders were given anatomically incorrect features, such as back-to-front feet. In other renders, our characters were prepared for bad weather and carried umbrellas. We didn’t prompt for these features but were given them anyway. Peculiar? Very.

Predictability. We are mindful of how prompts are implemented – we’ve found they aren’t always read as intended. This means being creative with how we phrase things and learning how to ‘talk the language’.

Plagiarism. We are hyper-aware of the risk of plagiarism. AI design tools trained on existing images may inadvertently mimic other work, and this can cause unintended legal and ethical issues. To prevent this, we take steps to guarantee it doesn’t plagiarise other artists. In this case, we evolved the initial AI characters into unique illustrations before resubmitting them for final renders and animations. Providing your own work as a basis removes the risk of plagiarism… after all, we all know that there’s no such thing as a unique idea.

And finally, we want to emphasise that we believe using AI to create work for a client is only ever appropriate if your client is in full agreement. Ethical, trustworthy conduct is the glue that holds our client relationships together, and that naturally extends to how we use AI in our work.