AI brought these iconic Campbell’s, Apple, and Penn tennis print ads to life

Classic ads from the golden age of print advertising in the 1950s and 1960s used sharp word play and visual sleights of hand that stand the test of time. The clock doesn’t run out on clever.

But the ads themselves are static, and we’re in the pivot-to-video age. So one creative director is taking a stab at updating the medium. Thanks to the magic of artificial intelligence, these ads are being brought to life.

Selim Ünlüsoy, the new global head of AI at Italian ad agency LePub, posted a video to LinkedIn depicting several well-known print ads that he animated with AI. The video is set to RJD2’s “Beautiful Mind,” the theme song from Mad Men. Ünlüsoy made the video with Dream Machine, an AI tool from the startup Luma AI, which recently animated popular memes.

In one part of Ünlüsoy’s AI video, the iconic ’60s era VW Beetle in Doyle Dane Bernbach’s classic Volkswagen’s 1959 “Think small” ad drives into the foreground and off the page. In another, depicting Campbell’s 1962 “Soup on the rocks” ad, the soup is actually being poured into the glass.

The animations aren’t perfect. Parts of the video give away the fact it’s been generated by AI. Take the inconsistent way the glass in the “Soup on the rocks” ad fills up, or the ever-changing finger arrangement on the gloved hand on Apple’s 1984 “Test drive a Macintosh” ad.

In a 1972 ad for Kodak’s Pocket camera, the model turns around to reveal the ad’s copy is part of her sweater and two people behind her are shown holding an entirely different camera hallucinated by the AI image generator.

The cleanest ads in the video don’t add much to the original. The animated version of Penn’s 1988 French Open ad simply pans over an image of a tennis ball in the shape of a croissant. AI does a better job adding perspective to a still image, as this one does, than it does animating images, but it begs the question, what does AI really add to a concept if it simply adds a little motion?

AI certainly has its limitations, so creatives looking to implement the technology in their work might take a page from DDB’s classic Volkswagen ad: think small.