Amorphous Toys "R" Us

by Casey Goetz
  

A couple days after its release, I heard of an all-AI ad from Toys “R” Us receiving strong backlash from pretty much everyone with an opinion.  I found this interesting for a couple reasons, that Toys “R” Us is still around, and that we have finally created an ad using only generative AI.

Initially, I heard about this from a content creator on youtube, and decided to follow up on why Toys “R” Us was the first to the finish with this project, and this WSJ article; All-AI Ad From Toys ‘R’ Us Inspires Debate Over the Future of Marketing by Patrick Coffee speculates and reasons why Toys “R” Us has made a big step in a new direction of advertising.

Toys “R” Us’ chief marketing officer Kim Miller Olko was excited to be the first to try out this technology.  The ad features the late founder of Toys “R” Us as a child, exploring a toy store in his imagination and meeting a sentient giraffe toy.  Taken as a showcase, this is impressive technology.  The vibrant colors and transitions look very flashy, like seeing movie level effects.  At first glance, it certainly looks nice.  Writers used paragraphs as food for the AI to turn into video directly.  The AI even understood most of the assignment right away, but struggled to grasp facial expressions as they related to the importance of the scene.

The author points out that this move wasn’t without criticism, however.  Unsurprisingly, Twitter ate the ad alive.  Users noted that the child appears to look generated differently in different frames, as though 4 child actors were used, to make the comparison to a real ad.  Some scenes appear to have a messy blend of objects that seem like toys, but actually have no discernable detail and look like an amalgamation of things supposed to look like toys.  Coffee also interviews the former chief creative officer of Facebook, Mark D’arcy.  D’arcy is looking forward to more of this technology being used in the future, but ultimately finds this first attempt uninteresting and unremarkable.

The author didn’t dive into the ethical dilemma posed by the further introduction of AI into the workplace, but I think it’s important to discuss.  Generative AI such as this is extremely taxing on power grids, and uses a lot of energy in general.  Sure, Toys “R” Us saves time, money, and resources by creating an ad this way, but that also puts pressure on agencies that would otherwise be hired to make the ad, supporting jobs for writers, graphic designers, artists, and more.  There’s also some dark humor in the first literally soulless ad being made about childlike wonder and serving to cater to kids.

Toys “R” Us undoubtedly put themselves back on the map, however.  They plan to run this ad during the holiday season of this year to herald their return to the states in brick-and-mortar store locations.  This ad campaign perfectly illustrates Toys “R” Us’ value proposition, even if it is full of imperfect illustration.  It’s a simple ad that prefers to show, rather than tell.  The greatest toy store, wrought from AI horror and a child’s dream.