A huge cat stands beside a litter box, surrounded by other cats watching it. That image alone sets the tone of Fresh Step’s campaign: take an everyday household concern and push it into the absurd. With artificial intelligence, even feline casting can become rather ambitious.
One of the most powerful applications of generative AI in marketing is certainly the creation of video ads.
Creating three ads in thirty days
Fresh Step, Clorox’s cat litter brand, worked with agency RECE to strengthen its positioning on odour control. Thanks to AI, the three 15-second ads took just 30 days from brief to completion, at a reported cost of one-tenth of a traditional production. AI also helped prototype creative ideas.
Savings are welcome, but assessing advertising effectiveness requires other measures: brand recall, understanding of the benefit, purchase intent and sales.
The campaign’s ads
Fresh Step’s other ads add two situations to the giant cat: a dog trying to find the litter box and a queue of cats in the street. These short stories let us observe how the idea changes while keeping the product recognisable.
Let’s watch with one question in mind: after fifteen seconds, what stays with us?
A funny character can attract attention. For the brand, it also matters that the scene brings to mind a reason to choose its litter. That connection deserves attention when we assess advertising made with AI.
What we can learn from this case
Imagine having to choose between three campaign proposals. Reading three scripts means picturing the pace, expressions and atmosphere. Discussing an early visual version makes those choices more concrete: we can spot sooner whether the joke lands and whether the product appears too late.
This suggests a useful criterion for future cases: look at which decision AI helps us make better. More accessible production becomes valuable when it allows us to compare meaningful alternatives. Simply multiplying the variants risks increasing the time needed to choose between them.
For marketers, the exercise is to bring creativity and evaluation together. Define the benefit to communicate, choose what to change between two versions and decide how to assess them. Even with a giant cat on screen, we still need to find out whether the audience will remember the brand.
AI makes prototyping more effective and faster, but also allows us to explore new creative avenues. Personally, I find this last aspect the most interesting. Creating giant cats, cats that talk or dance, and generally making videos that go beyond reality is where AI can help us.