Love in the Age of AI: How D-ID Crafted an Interactive Valentine’s Day Soap Opera

This past Valentine’s Day, D-ID embarked on an ambitious journey to demonstrate the power of generative AI in creating compelling media content without the hefty price tag of traditional production. Leveraging advanced AI tools, we crafted an engaging and interactive campaign that captured hearts and showcased the innovative potential of AI in creative industries. The campaign aimed to show our users how generative AI can truly transform their marketing strategy and how easily they can fit multi-pronged campaigns like ours into their budget. 

Campaign Overview

To kick off the campaign, we began by brainstorming ideas for an original and attention-grabbing concept. We wanted something that would resonate with our audience personally while also showcasing the capabilities of AI video. Each Valentine’s Day, consumers are overwhelmed with hundreds of emails in their inboxes and posts in their feeds about love boxes of chocolates, flowers, and more. We set out to do something different, we wanted to talk about love in a way that isn’t usually used on such a holiday – we wanted drama! After much consideration, we landed on the idea of creating a romantic soap opera between two digital humans. 

The Challenge

Many in the digital marketing industry face the dilemma of the high cost and resource intensity of producing captivating video content. Traditional methods require a team of writers, artists, actors, and editors, not to mention the logistical and financial burdens of shooting and post-production. These costs can dramatically change depending on the length of the video and how intricately detailed it is – including additions like animation. Therefore, a promotional video can range between $3,000 to $30,000 and much more. D-ID aimed to address these challenges by producing a Valentine’s Day campaign that was not only engaging and romantic but also cost-effective, utilizing the latest in AI-driven content creation. We only had two on-staff writers, one idea, and the world of Generative AI. Challenge accepted.

How D-ID Solved It

The creation of our Valentine’s Day campaign was a testament to the capabilities of generative AI. We started with character creation in Leonardo.ai, a free image creation tool that uses generative AI to create images on demand, where AI brought to life the protagonists of our soap opera, Emily and Alex. Next, we asked OpenAI’s ChatGPT 4 for help writing a compelling script about a romantic relationship, infusing drama and emotion into the storyline. Our prompt was simply “Write me a 1-minute daytime soap drama about a romantic relationship between two characters.”

Our speaking AI avatars, crafted in D-ID’s Creative Reality™ Studio, added depth and realism to the characters, providing a voice and personality that resonated with viewers. We simply uploaded each character’s image and script into the Studio, chose a voice and accent that resonated with the character’s persona, and clicked generate. Note: You can also have AI write a script within the Studio using a similar prompt to the one mentioned above. Canva‘s comprehensive toolkit facilitated the production process, allowing us to assemble the final video with ease. We integrated our speaking avatars, selected fitting music, and chose the appropriate background from Canva’s extensive database to set the perfect scene. This step required manual editing and attention to detail. Still, it did not require previous expertise in any video editing software, so could have been done by anyone on staff with enough patience.

Taking Things to the Next Level

Finally, the campaign’s pièce de résistance was embodied by Emily, a D-ID Agent created within our Studio platform. She was not just a character but an interactive entity, capable of engaging with the audience through a human-like AI chatbot, using information and responses derived from meticulously compiled source material. Emily the agent knew everything about the character from the video, down to her feelings for Alex, their relationship troubles, and the investigative work that her character alludes to in the video. The goal of this aspect of the campaign was to bring the characters to life, taking the video to the next level and creating an unprecedented interactive journey. 

Using generative and conversational AI, we were able to seamlessly integrate multiple platforms to create an inexpensive marketing campaign that did not require external vendors.

Impact and Achievements

The campaign was posted organically on D-ID’s social media accounts: LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. It garnered extensive engagement across these various platforms. Viewers were captivated by the innovative use of AI to create a genuinely entertaining and interactive experience. The feedback was overwhelmingly positive, with many praising the use of AI to do all the heavy lifting. The campaign not only achieved its goal of demonstrating the potential of AI in reducing production costs – our total cost for this campaign was $0 –  but also set a new standard for creativity and innovation in marketing.

In addition to thousands of video views on a day saturated with holiday-themed content, hundreds of users initiated a conversation with Emily’s interactive avatar, answering an average of 4.3 questions per user. Interesting note: Two weeks after the Valentine’s Day launch, we shared Emily the Agent in our monthly newsletter, inviting people to chat with her to their heart’s content, leading to a second significant spike in usage. Our marketing campaign successfully used another channel to get our message across, and the response was amazing!

D-ID’s Valentine’s Day campaign epitomized the transformative potential of generative AI in the creative and marketing industries. By effectively leveraging AI tools, D-ID demonstrated that it is possible to create high-quality, engaging, and interactive content without the traditional costs and resources. This campaign marks the way for future endeavors, highlighting the endless possibilities when technology and creativity converge, and setting a new benchmark for innovative, cost-effective marketing strategies in the digital age of AI avatars.