Praha
We created an AI artist to ‘dream’ street art
In a radical new campaign for Molson Coors lager brand, Praha, we trained an AI artist to ‘dream’ street art and pitted it against real street artists in the ultimate celebration of heritage and progress.
Praha is a bold Czech lager with a bright taste, thanks to its low abv which sets it apart from many Czech beers. The brand wanted an innovative activation campaign to raise brand awareness and drive sales amongst young, urban drinkers across Hungary, Croatia, Romania and Bulgaria.
Named after Prague, Praha’s brand identity is heavily influenced by the city’s strong cultural heritage and unconventional thinking – beautifully captured in the vibrant street art scene. Because Praha stands for bold actions delivered in a light way, we combined the artistic culture of Prague with the deft touch of modern machine learning for a campaign as bold and refreshing as Praha.
How? By training AI to be a street artist.
To realise this vision, our Digital team created a machine learning model and fed it over 3000 collated, categorised images of street art, creating a data set from which the AI will learn, dream and create its own unique art.
The technology is a GAN (generative adversarial network), an advanced form of generative AI pioneered by researchers from leading tech companies and universities. Combining this advanced programming with extremely powerful computing systems means we can process as much a 2TB of data and execute 936 trillion operations in a second – that’s more than 80 times as powerful as a Macbook. And because it’s a conditional GAN model, we are able to direct its dreams according to assigned themes: typography, figures, faces…
To put our AI artist to the test, we’re pitting it against Bulgarian street art duo, Arsek & Erase, and asking Praha’s online followers to judge. The competition will play out on Praha’s social media platforms, where people will be asked to vote for the most bold and creative artworks, without knowing which comes from our AI. The winning artwork will be printed into limited edition hoodies which followers will have a chance to win.
Matt Marlow Digital Operations Manager EMEA & APAC at Molson Coors, says: “We immediately fell in love with this campaign idea. Praha is all about statement-making and self-expression and this campaign really reflects that. We also love the idea of a campaign which creates its own visuals, it’s a fresh and exciting way to bring the brand to life which is sure to resonate with the audience.”
Patrick Furse, Digital Director, says: “It isn’t often you can say to a Client we don’t know what the creative output will be. But this campaign is as much about the journey as the end product and we’re extremely lucky the team at Praha reflect their brand’s boldness because it gave us the opportunity to think big. Through the inspiration of our creative team, the technical expertise of our digital team, and the incisive communication of our Client Services teams, we’ve had the pleasure of delivering an original campaign which really captures the imagination. A dream project for a dream Client.”
The campaign is running on Praha’s Instagram throughout October, with the final artworks revealed for judging towards the end of the month.
For more information on how Bray Leino can drive growth through creativenergy® for your food & drink brand, contact Adam Holder, Managing Partner