Mini’s New AI Marketing Campaign Is Straight Out of ‘Black Mirror’
Black Mirror: One day, all actors will be replaced by AI. Mini: Idea!
Further solidifying the reputation most marketing majors have of being utterly unable to read a room, Mini's crack ad team has cooked up a new campaign in which the company captures your face and voice, and then uses AI to generate a version of you who is, like, suspiciously enthusiastic about buying a new electric Mini.
It's being dubbed "Trust Your Inner Mini-Logue"—yeah—and the AI tool is available here on Mini's U.S. website.
"Better than any car salesman or dealership, the most persuasive voice in a car buying journey is inside the customer’s own head," reads Mini's press release. "To juxtapose the often serious and practical mindset that comes with purchasing a new vehicle, the 'Trust Your Inner Mini-Logue' campaign aims to cater to that fun-loving, thrill-seeking and self-indulgent voice that lives in all of us."
You cannot make this up.
The cherry on top of this late-stage capitalist nightmare is, of course, the sight of "yourself" spewing trite, r/HailCorporate cringe like this:
All this is happening just as the Screen Actors Guild walks off the job partly in response to a Black Mirror-esque proposal from Hollywood studios that would see background extras have their likeness captured and used for AI-generated performances in perpetuity in exchange for a single day's pay. An idea presumably brought to you by the same MBAs who watched Squid Game, completely missed the point, and unironically thought, "We should do that for realsies."
Evidently, some of their classmates ended up in Mini's marketing department because this "Mini-Logue" thing is not good. Outside of the problematic-adjacent AI-privacy aspect, the very notion that no one can convince you to buy a Mini better than you can is patently hilarious if you actually think about it for, like, more than three seconds.
In short, I award this no points, and may God have mercy on our souls.
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