We had to find a way out. Five retail marketing campaigns per year are just way too much to equip them all with self-produced images. Even moderately priced photographers would have been beyond budget, even for one of Europe’s largest airports – Frankfurt Airport.

For a while, the campaign was supported by stock photography. Yes, it helps to stay within budget, but it’s not a good way to create a unique and coherent campaign, it doesn’t support the brand. We switched to illustrations. Did it help? Not really. More coherence, but still low awareness and – even more painful – low buy-in on the side of the retailers at the airport.

It was the summer of 2023, and we were starting to experiment with AI generated images. On Midjourney. Even in this early phase, the opportunities seemed endless. And it was obvious that we would give it a try, creating visuals for that year’s Christmas campaign at the airport.

Not surprisingly, the task proved a lot harder than expected. Creating visuals on Midjourney may seem easy – but as soon as you are adding the filter of a campaign brief, things get tricky.

First big challenge: if you create Christmas visuals, AI will always reflect what Christmas looks like on the internet. And that will automatically lead to standard, even cliche images. In fact, they really don’t look much different from stock material.

Second big challenge: if you want campaign visuals that support the brand and the sales targets, the content you create will need to be more specific than just “nice Christmas visuals”. For the airport one of the needs was to find a way to relate to retail. We’re trying to convince people to go shopping or to have a meal, and not just wish them a happy holiday.

Third and biggest challenge: it all doesn’t work without a solid creative idea. And even then it might not be good enough, simply because a great idea is nothing if it isn’t supported by an outstanding design idea.

Once the brief is written – where do you start? Exactly. The creative idea. Not easy for a holiday campaign. People have a clear idea of what Christmas looks like, what it feels like, and if you deliberately avoid these expectations, your campaign will probably just annoy or alienate them. No, it’s not a unique idea to have red Christmas tree. No, it’s not a unique idea to put it upside down. It’s all been done a thousand times.

We didn’t want to break with Christmas traditions. What we really wanted to do was open them up for a more adequate campaign. After all, a large international airport like Frankfurt serves people from every country on the planet, and as much as Christmas may have a core of concepts that is constant, the way it is celebrated will vary considerably.

So we asked ourselves: what does Santa really look like? Not in advertising, but in the homes of the people across the globe? Do families in Kenya fly in old white guys with big white beards to let them hand out the presents to their children? Certainly not.

Santa isn’t white. He may not even be a man. And he might as well be young. Anything is possible. And that was the core of our idea. Not Santa. Christmas people. The ones that celebrate Christmas their way. Just like the guests at the airport enjoy airport shopping their way.

Does that lead to outstanding and unique images if you integrate that into a Midjourney prompt? Absolutely not. All you get is a slight variation. It’s the same cliche images with the simple difference that the person in the costume isn’t an old white guy.

For one frustrating month, we didn’t come up with anything that stood out, that would really set our Christmas campaign apart from all the other holiday campaigns out there.

Admittedly, in the early days of Midjourney, a brief like this was an enormous challenge. Two things were absolutely crucial at that stage: making the core of the idea much more visible, and consequently finding a unique design approach to do this.

After all these weeks of futile prompting, time was starting to run out. And then we brought someone in that had already gone far beyond the obvious on Midjourney (see credits below). In fact, he had even worked on creating unique characters in strikingly artful environments, as half-portraits. Ideal for what we needed.

In hindsight, the choice looks much more logical than it did at that point. He had been a designer for decades, and he was already exploring the opportunities Midjourney had to offer. A prompter wouldn’t have helped, and a designer without considerable experience in AI would not have led to the same challenges we were facing at the start of the project.

Within a week, we had first images. Bold stuff. Nothing like the airport’s marketing crew had ever done. So different that my feelings were mixed – excitement, because suddenly we had images that did exactly what I had hoped for, and fear, because I wasn’t quite sure whether this would be met with the same excitement on the side of the airport’s retail leadership.

But it was. They loved it. And a few weeks later, we put it on air. Yes, there were a few timid voices that were afraid that these highly unusual Christmas characters might be met with criticism or scorn – but it didn’t happen. The opposite happened. And most importantly, the retailers were suddenly enthusiastic about our campaign.

It took a lot of trial and error. Even today, AI is generous when it comes to putting fingers on people’s hands, and in the early days it was virtually impossible to create an image of a person holding something in their hands in a way that looked halfway in line with the laws of gravity and anatomy.

Another nut to crack: coming up with five visuals that were clearly and unmistakably one campaign. Midjourney’s interpretations of what is a series of visuals was at times wildly diverging, and it took a lot of patience and persistence to keep the visuals closely connected.

It’s fair to say that we more or less hacked Midjourney. We made it do things it wasn’t created to do. It’s based on working with what is already out there, and we wanted something that absolutely wasn’t.

Did we succeed? Exactly, one year later, we tested ourselves. We wanted to know just how far we had gone away from what Midjourney would produce if it wasn’t based on all the prompting history we had accumulated.

This is how: we simply copied the very last prompt of one of our Christmas visuals, entered it into a fresh Midjourney account and let it work on it. I’ll tell you more when we get into the making of Christmas 2024 😉

Credits:

Prompting and design: HP Becker at New Cat Orange
POS implementation: EPP Sales
Social media: House of Yas
Frankfurt Airport retail team: Tabea Palmer, Dr. Thomas Frank