Call it tradition or habit, but pop culture has a long track record of either loving or hating advertising characters. From Progressive’s Flo to the Verizon guy to Dos Equis’ Most Interesting Man In The World, decades of mascots have risen and fallen at the hands of audiences.
Fiverr’s latest campaign casts an AI-generated character at the heart of a new love-hate brand dynamic. The freelancer marketplace introduces Garry, who unwittingly finds himself in various calamities due to his AI skepticism.
Created with generative AI video platforms including Google’s Veo3 and Runway, the 90-second spot depicts Garry in slapstick scenarios such as a bird pooping on his car, his wife leaving him for a man dressed as a hot dog, and stuck waist-deep in cement. Other scenes reference recent viral moments like the misogynist memes plaguing WNBA games and the Nicki Minaj stiletto challenge on TikTok.
“We’re going to leverage Garry as a kind of punching bag for the internet,” Fiverr chief marketing officer (CMO) Matti Yahav told ADWEEK.
Beyond the hero ad, the brand is inviting people to submit ideas for scenes in which Garry could appear–offering to generate a new one for every 5,000 comments the video receives on each platform. For example, after the Love Island USA reunion on Aug. 25, Garry will star in his own villa-themed vignette.
The brand’s goal is to show off AI tools in real time and enter cultural conversations.
“We wanted to convey in this video a very high speed energy, and to show a lot of scenes in order to create this feeling that it’s unbelievable what we created with AI,” Yahav said.
A challenge to agencies
Made by Fiverr’s in-house creative team and two freelance directors, Noam Sharon and Tal Rosenthal, the campaign jabs at traditional marketing agencies to promote Fiverr’s platform as a place to find emerging talent who are fluent with AI.
Sharon and Rosenthal are also the creative brains behind the recent viral AI-generated spec ad for Liquid Death. Fiverr didn’t find Sharon and Rosenthal on its platform, but the team has since signed up to it, Yahav said.
Using AI saved Fiverr money, according to Yahav, who said the company spent about 10% of its typical production budget for this type of campaign.
“I would [typically] need to join forces with an agency and a production house and to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars,” Yahav said. “I would be able to do that as a big customer going to the big agencies, but most [small- and medium-sized businesses] obviously don’t have the ability to do that.”
