📱 Microsoft Made an AI-Generated Ad, and No One Noticed

In January, Microsoft released a one-minute ad for its Surface Pro and Surface Laptop. Three months later, the team revealed that AI did most of the work. By then, the video had racked up over 40,000 views on YouTube—and no one seemed to notice anything unusual.

🎬 From Script to Post-Production

The team used AI at every stage, from brainstorming ideas and writing the script to generating visual scenes and transitions. Only a few shots involved real actors, like close-ups of hands typing on a keyboard. The team also manually corrected any unnatural-looking details.

At first, the artists described the general idea of each scene to a chatbot. The AI-generated detailed prompts in response, and the team kept refining and tweaking the prompts until they got the desired results.

"We probably went through thousands of different prompts, chiseling away at the output little by little until we got what we wanted," said сreative director Cisco McCarthy.

For some parts of the video, they generated images based on text and reference photos. They later animated them using Hailuo AI and Kling AI.

🎬 More Freedom for Creativity

According to Microsoft, using AI helped cut production time and costs by about 90%. But it wasn't just about saving time—automation also freed up artists from routine tasks so they could focus more on the creative work.

"The faster we can make something move, the more creative freedom it gives us," explained visual designer Brian Townsend.

What do you think about AI in advertising?

❤️ — it's great; that's progress!
🙈 — it's bad; it's misleading!

#news #Microsoft @hiaimediaen