Lidl's Viral GenAI Marketing Success
Source: pymnts.com
Lidl's GenAI Marketing Campaign
Lidl France collaborated with Marcel Worldwide, a creative agency, and used generative AI (GenAI) for a successful marketing campaign. The campaign featured a GenAI app called “Lidlize,” which allowed users to create images using Lidl's brand colors: red, blue, and yellow, according to a case study from partner Bria, a visual GenAI company. The custom visual AI model from Bria was trained using licensed datasets and used AWS cloud infrastructure.
Lidlize App Success
The “Lidlize” app was embraced by consumers, who generated images of objects such as cars, shoes, and pet statuettes. Users only needed to type the name of what they wanted to create. Within three weeks, the app was used to create over 1.7 million images. The campaign was promoted by influencers, and users shared their Lidl-branded content on social media. Image requests reached over 1,000 per minute at its peak.
According to Christophe Sennet, technical director at Marcel, the results surpassed expectations. Oded Lavie, vice president of innovation and global GenAI partnerships at Publicis, noted that the technology performed perfectly and auto-scaled, and people enjoyed creating items in Lidl’s style.
GenAI Benefits
Business leaders are seeing increased benefits from using GenAI. A reported nearly 90% of CFOs surveyed saw “very positive ROI” from GenAI implementation. Consequently, businesses are using the technology in more ways. In particular, 70% used GenAI to create new content.
Campaign Implementation
The campaign required the AI to produce on-brand visuals, support multiple languages, maintain low latency, and comply with the EU AI Act. OpenAI’s AI models were used to understand user prompts, and spaCY was used to apply rules regarding allowed content. The platform could trace AI-generated assets back to their licensed origin. Marcel designed a system that removed the need for user-generated prompts, which standardized outputs and varied object types. The platform reduced image generation time and included automatic translation for French inputs.