Year 2017the America’s most iconic toy store, Toys R Ushe went to the bankruptcy. Known for its large stores such as NY where there were games and exhibitions next to the toy shelves, he fell prey to his large debts and due to the arrival of the online market competition with companies like Amazon and other retail players who embraced new consumer trends in time.
A year later, it would close all its stores, but as often happens in these cases, the brand survived as a piece of paper that, with its new shareholders, has re-emerged. Today Toys R Us has opened two stores, but mainly continues to serve through its website and an agreement with the store Macy’s to be your toy section.
A be reborn that today the company is celebrating and did it in the best way that the board of directors that presides over it today could achieve: generating a commercial made entirely by Artificial Intelligence.
The video of 66 secondswas created by the agency Native Foreign and seeks to relate the origin of the company at the hands of its founder, Charles Lazaruswho in the 1930s had the inspiration to create Geoffreythe stuffed giraffe who would become the mascot of Toys R Us. But instead of using stock footage or finding a similar child actor, the company decided to use sorathe video creator of OpenAI to create the images of the spot, which include everything from humans interacting to dream sequences.
soralike ChatGPT, operates through written requests, which are translated into video segments that can last up to one minute. For this commercial, a series of videos were requested representing different things, such as the shot of the bicycle shop, the gestures of the young man Charles or the movements of the stuffed giraffe. All this material was then edited by a team of humans, who also added the voiceover and music, which was not enough to save a piece that instead of inspiring humanity ends up demonstrating the opposite.
Of course in social networks The commercial received mixed reactions. On the one hand, there are those who applaud the use of the tools or the effectiveness of the commercial, considering that many people did not know that Toys R Us was back and now, somehow, they already know.
But there are also those who criticize the results of the product. Not only because of the unnatural movements or the inaccuracy of his drawings, but also more complex details, such as how, for example, the young man Charles Lazarus appears with four different faces during the commercial, and not because he has been growing, simply because he is saving a child actor.
And it is true, leaning on AI To carry out better processes is a benefit, but this commercial shows that leaving everything in the hands of the machine is not optimal and that sometimes it is better to trust the imagination of a child than that of a computer.
