Fall is on its final stretch, and Christmas decorations are starting to take over front yards and shopping malls. Frankfurt Airport’s fall campaign has called it a day too, after five eventful weeks. As always, we spent a lot of time getting our visuals done on a handful of AI tools, and it was a slightly tougher nut to crack than usual.
Even almost two years into our campaign, AI isn’t always easy to work with. Especially when the communication needs are complex. We wanted a little bit more of a German touch, we needed to create visuals with and without our Miles and More “5” indicating the quintuple miles promotion, we needed a seasonal touch, and obviously retail and f&b needed to be represented.
That’s a lot, even for Midjourney, even in 2025. It took a while, and we needed a reset in the middle of development, simply because our visuals were getting a little too crowded. They looked great – but more in an artful sense than as images with a promotional task.
AI in motion
In a way, this campaign is the last one in what is something like a first generation. Ever since AI platforms started offering image-to-video, we have continuously tested them with our images. For a very long time, the content created wasn’t good enough, and when the results started to look more natural, they weren’t scalable for large digital screens or led to unacceptable results after having been brought to high resolution.
Fortunately, those days are over. The third year of Frankfurt Airport’s retail marketing campaign will finally feature AI-generated video, starting with our third AI-based Christmas promotion.
Fall in action
The biggest success of this campaign is still the ever-increasing support of the retailers and restaurants at the airport. It hasn’t just grown all the way to the shelves of the retailers, it is starting to even become part of their product offering.
More and more, restaurants are aligning part of their menus to our campaign, choosing seasonal selections to be tied in, being featured on special communication at their entrance and on the tables.
Newest spin in this great integration is a special edition wine, offered only at Frankfurt Duty Free. Limited to 300 bottles, hand numbered, only sold at Frankfurt Airport, even presented by the winemaker herself. It’s an especially fine Riesling created by Juliane Eller at Juwel Weine in Alsheim, just 50 kilometers southwest of Frankfurt Airport.
Needless to say that passengers were more than happy to try her excellent wines, and the limited edition didn’t last very long. The next collaboration with Juwel Weine is already in preparation – but that’s still a secret.
More options – more complexity
As much as the massive speed of development in AI image and video generation may be thrilling – the complexity is increasing at the same rate. To get from image to full HD video in consistently high quality, the number of steps is increasing, for every step there are more and more solutions, and each combination has its own advantages and disadvantages. Oh, and every update of every one of those solutions changes the path from image to video.
We’ll get a little deeper into that when Christmas comes. Have a wonderful fall. With a glass of great wine.
