AI marketing breaks new ground: three creative approaches that stand out
Tired of predictable AI marketing use cases? This week, three brands remind us that artificial intelligence can still surprise. Virgin Voyages turns Jennifer Lopez into a deepfake invitation machine, a Turkish fishing club creates fake memories from the 90s, and Indian Railways turns anti-fraud efforts into a national lottery.
Three examples that prove that, beyond optimization, AI can still inspire wonder.
Virgin Voyages: Jennifer Lopez becomes your personal press secretary
Virgin Voyages has crossed a fascinating line with its deepfake campaign. The idea? Allow anyone to create a personalized video invitation in which Jennifer Lopez directly invites your family and friends to join you on a cruise.
The mechanism: You download the tool, customize the message, and the AI generates a video in which J.Lo addresses your mother-in-law or your best friend by name to convince them to join you. The deepfake is perfectly mastered, the experience is playful.
What works: Virgin turns its customers into creative ambassadors. Each invitation becomes a mini social event that generates buzz and organic engagement. Large-scale personalization creates artificial intimacy… that works.
The takeaway: Marketing deepfakes are no longer taboo; they become engagement tools when they are embraced and playful. Virgin proves that you can play with controversial technology while keeping a smile.
Istanbul Fishing Club: Vintage memories entirely AI-generated
The Turkish studio AImagination has produced a striking creative idea for the Istanbul Fishing Club. The aim: to create the visual history of an urban passion that had never been documented.
The approach: Produce a complete series of ’90s archive photos generated entirely by AI, showing Istanbul’s urban fishermen in their element. Silver grain, washed-out colors, authentic poses… it’s all there, except that nothing existed before.
Creative impact: These fake archives create a collective nostalgia for moments that never existed. Club members adopt these images as their real memories, weaving a visual mythology of their community.
Narrative innovation: AImagination rewrites history with AI to create an artificial but emotionally real cultural heritage. An approach that questions our relationship to authenticity and collective memory.
This campaign asks us: can the emotion generated by fake memories be as powerful as that created by real ones?
Indian Railways ‘Lucky Yatra’: Transforming fraud into a national lottery
Facing widespread fraud on its trains, the Indian railway network found a brilliant Cannes Lions 2025–winning solution: turning every valid ticket into a lottery ticket.
The system: Each legal journey automatically qualifies to participate in daily and weekly drawings. Prizes up for grabs: free trips, upgrades, VIP experiences. The mechanism perfectly leverages the Indian passion for games of chance.
Results: Compliance soars, fraud collapses, and the public image of the railway company transforms. From a regulatory burden, train travel becomes a chance opportunity.
The cultural approach: Instead of punishing fraudsters, Indian Railways rewards honest citizens by leaning on a strong cultural driver — Indian civic gamification.
This revolutionary approach raises a universal question: how could your operational constraints become levers of engagement?
AI marketing finds its creative soul again
These three cases illustrate AI marketing finally freed from pure optimization. Virgin Voyages creates artificial intimacy, Istanbul Fishing Club fabricates generated nostalgia, and Indian Railways gamifies civic engagement.
What to take away: These brands use AI to create experiences that would be impossible without it, not merely to optimize the existing. Artificial intelligence becomes again a tool of imagination, not just efficiency.
Strategic analysis: The most powerful AI does not copy humans; it invents what humans could not do alone. Creative deepfakes, artificial archives, behavioral gamification… many unexplored territories.
✨ Weekly inspiration
List three operational constraints of your organization. For each, ask yourself: “What if AI could transform this problem into a creative opportunity?”
Like our Indian friends: your biggest challenges may hide your best marketing innovations.
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