In partnership with
Beekeeper's Naturals' 'Stories from the Hive' turns real customers into storybook animation: two short films and three illustrated social testimonials. Culver City production company FIN Studios made it from customers who nominated themselves, among them a Pennsylvania nurse and a New England event-planning business owner.
FIN filmed each customer first, so the stories are told in their own words. Illustrator Amanda Tsoukanelis hand-drew the characters and backgrounds, AI was used to streamline the animation, and everything was composited in After Effects.
Where AI sat: AI was introduced to streamline the animation process. — LBB
On the record:
What we got weren't just testimonials, but views into the lives of our most loyal customers.
Today in Creative AI
Adobe added hands-on editing controls to its plugin in ChatGPT on September 29. You select part of an image in a side panel and ask for a change, and Photoshop and Adobe Express sliders for hue, saturation or contrast appear, scoped to your selection.
Chat and editor stay in sync, and PDFs can be edited in place. It's an update to the plugin Adobe launched in August, rolling out globally on web and app.
Today’s Sponsor:
How Jennifer Aniston’s LolaVie brand grew sales 40% with CTV ads
For its first CTV campaign, Jennifer Aniston’s DTC haircare brand LolaVie had a few non-negotiables. The campaign had to be simple. It had to demonstrate measurable impact. And it had to be full-funnel.
LolaVie used Roku Ads Manager to test and optimize creatives — reaching millions of potential customers at all stages of their purchase journeys. Roku Ads Manager helped the brand convey LolaVie’s playful voice while helping drive omnichannel sales across both ecommerce and retail touchpoints.
The campaign included an Action Ad overlay that let viewers shop directly from their TVs by clicking OK on their Roku remote. This guided them to the website to buy LolaVie products.
Discover how Roku Ads Manager helped LolaVie drive big sales and customer growth with self-serve TV ads.
The DTC beauty category is crowded. To break through, Jennifer Aniston’s brand LolaVie, worked with Roku Ads Manager to easily set up, test, and optimize CTV ad creatives. The campaign helped drive a big lift in sales and customer growth, helping LolaVie break through in the crowded beauty category.
The Read
Both stories put a human hand back on the output. FIN had an illustrator draw every character before AI touched the animation, and Adobe is adding sliders because a prompt is a clumsy way to brighten one coffee cup.
The customers did the hardest part. They told their own stories, on camera, before anyone drew a line.
For brands: Film the real person first, even if the finished piece is animated. You get their actual words, and an answer when someone asks what was real.
For agencies: Put hand-drawn key art on the estimate as its own line, apart from the AI animation. Clients should see which part is hand-drawn and which is AI.
Tool Review → Fireflies
A meeting assistant that joins Zoom, Google Meet and Teams calls, transcribes in 100-plus languages, and summarizes and searches conversations. Free has limited summaries and 400 minutes of storage per team, and Pro is $18 a seat a month, or $10 billed annually.
A campaign built on customers' own words can start with calls, and Fireflies turns them into transcripts you can search for the line that becomes the script. The honest limit: accuracy drops with heavy accents, jargon and background noise, so anything going on air gets checked against the recording.
Worth it if research calls are your raw material. Skip it if nobody will search the transcripts afterward.
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