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Welcome back to Creating the Impossible Ad, a series covering the Google AI Lighthouse program, which challenges agencies to make an impossible ad campaign with the help of Google AI. Previously, we shared how digital-first marketing and technology services provider Monks built a personalization-driven campaign for sleep wellness company Hatch. Here, we talk to Tombras, the creative agency behind a successful AI-powered out-of-home campaign (OOH) for moving and storage company PODS.
How many lines of copy is it reasonable to ask an agency to write for an OOH campaign? A hundred? A thousand? What if the copy is displayed on the side of a truck, changing in real time to address almost every neighborhood in New York City?
Some might call it an impossible campaign — or at least one that would take many months to execute. But for creative agency Tombras, it took just 12 days from the day they kicked off creative development.
“The World’s Smartest Billboard” campaign for moving and storage company Portable On Demand Storage (PODS) was Tombras’ answer to the Google AI Lighthouse program brief, which challenged agencies to use Google AI to conceive and execute an impossible campaign, made possible with AI. In June, the participating agencies, including Tombras, unveiled their work at the Cannes International Festival for Creativity. Here’s how Tombras did the impossible with the help of Google AI.
A brief-building machine
To get started, the team asked Gemini for Google Workspace to suggest moments in the creative process where generative AI could contribute meaningfully. Gemini’s suggestions helped the cross-functional team break down silos.
“There’s a misconception that AI can replace positions in some cases, maybe automate some things. But in reality, it made our team work much closer together in ways we hadn’t before — even though we’re a full-service agency,” said Ryan Edwards, chief digital officer at Tombras. “Creative, production, media, strategy, analytics, all of that, we do in-house, and we do work really closely. But this project forced us to play a part in each stage together.”
The team trained Gemini on external data (for example, Google reviews, podcast transcripts, and industry reports) and internal data (such as, client briefing transcripts, marketing data, and audience insights). Once equipped with that information, they prompted Gemini to generate a creative brief. And generate, it did: After ingesting thousands of individual artifacts, Gemini produced 27 comprehensive pages of material. The next step required creatives to review the document to better understand the massive volume of information at their disposal and work with Gemini to distill the perfect brief.
By honing in on key findings, the team was able to reprompt Gemini and trim the brief to a focused and actionable three pages. “This [brief-making] was a testament to the scale, quickness, and ability of AI,” said Tombras’ executive creative director Avinash Baliga of the experiment, adding that it was also a testament to the importance of human decision-making in the process.
During this stage, the team uncovered the insight that would lead to their impossible ad campaign. In one episode of the podcast “How I Built This,” PODS founder Peter Warhurst tells host Guy Raz that the PODS containers themselves were the brand’s first billboards. For Baliga, the idea of containers-as-billboards unlocked the rest.
“It was great to take that initial piece of insight — that this has always been their most effective piece of advertising — and ask, can we take AI and build on that? That was the semi-idea we fed [the] AI and from there, things went further.”
Crafting the impossible campaign
To finalize the thousands of lines of copy needed for the campaign, the team first had to develop the right tone. “This was an exercise of trying to create a new voice,” said Baliga. “We want it to be smart and hyperaware, but friendly. So the creatives, in turn, become creative directors and try to coach Gemini into getting it out.”
Tombras accepted the Google AI Lighthouse program challenge to conceive and execute an impossible campaign, made possible with AI. The result was “The World’s Smartest Billboard” campaign for PODS, which they revealed at the Cannes International Festival for Creativity. See how they did it.
That coaching took many forms, from providing example copy to asking Gemini to pretend to be a 23-year-old living in a given neighborhood. Along with the role-playing prompts, Tombras used resources like brand archetypes and existing copy samples to help Gemini arrive at the first batch of lines. The team used the best of this group in combination with other materials and prompts to generate the next set of outputs. The selects were used to prompt Gemini again, culminating in 6,000 lines that contained the heart of the campaign. On the day of the activation, the billboard aired at least five lines per neighborhood, each one curated by a human expert.
“I would personally never agree to writing 6,000 lines,” said Baliga. But, with AI, the team was able to achieve the volume and variety that led to the second part of their ambitious campaign: Tailoring each line of copy to the neighborhood in which it would appear in real time.
“We built an API that was able to combine all the headline data plus all the real-time data and then provide it back to the truck to display,” said Tombras’ chief technology officer Juan Tubert. The API lived on the Google Cloud Platform and combined Vertex AI, Gemini, Maps, Sheets, and Cloud Run functions.
Results and future plans
In 29 hours, the truck traversed a total of 299 neighborhoods across the five boroughs, and the response was staggering. “I was shocked when the results came in,” said Edwards. “I was thinking it would be cool and capture a lot of attention, but not that it would return same-day and same-week results.” PODS website sessions were up 60% and requests for quotes — a key indicator of performance — were up 33% in the New York City area. The campaign results represented the biggest weekly year-over-year lift in New York for the brand in years.
“Our portable moving and storage containers have functioned as our billboards since PODS was founded over 25 years ago. Now, with the help of Google AI and Tombras, we can continue bringing that concept to life in a modernized and digitized way,” said Calvin Fields, VP of brand and media at PODS. “Not only were we able to reach customers across the Big Apple, we have found a new way to engage consumers, which is evident from the results.”
For Tombras, it was also proof positive that Gemini is an effective tool for experienced creative teams. Since the PODS campaign, Tombras has built their own AI suite of custom applications for their teams and clients. They now use Gemini to craft briefs and creative work for clients across their portfolio, applying what they learned from the campaign.
“The process, for us as an agency, was incredible, because we started understanding where Gemini could play more of a part and where humans could play more of a part,” said Baliga, referring to the agency’s direction and curation of Gemini’s outputs. “Voice and tone have always been slightly ephemeral. … For that to translate into something that feels unique is probably the hardest job. The fact that we could get a machine to be in on that exercise was really surprising. That’s going to be really interesting going forward.”