So that’s what we did at Zappi. We ran the creative past 150 AI synthetic respondents trained on real consumer response data. We had answers back in just minutes. The ad received the lowest possible score (1/5) and even synthetic respondents could spot the warning signs about the content of the ad. Its recommendation, in hindsight, is almost unbearable to read: “Soften or clarify the physical moment so it reads as playful rather than awkward.”
Testing with humans allows you to feel the fire and know exactly how hot it was. But AI was a smoke detector that, if it had only been in place, would have told people to look more closely before the brand equity went down in flames.
Now, to be very clear, AI should never be the cultural arbiter deciding what’s acceptable, but when content moves faster than the infrastructure legacy brands have at their disposal, it can be an incredibly helpful early warning system that tells a human when something deserves a second look.
What brand leaders should take from this
Who’s at fault here? Everybody involved. Who can learn from it? Marketers. Agencies. All of us.
Creator partnerships and the creator economy aren’t going away. Neither is the pressure to produce more content, faster, for increasingly fragmented audiences.
Brands need creators, and creators need brands. Both need better guardrails, frankly, to cover their own (brand) asse(t)s.
For brands, those guardrails protect hard-earned equity. For creators, they protect the livelihood and audience they’ve spent years building. The lesson isn’t to slow creator marketing down until it resembles traditional advertising. It’s to build processes capable of moving just as fast as the media they’re meant to govern. And in this not-so-new reality, what the Callaway scandal makes clear is that AI already has an important role to play, but that many brands remain behind the curve.
