Virgin Voyages use ‘Jen AI’ to ship cruises

Virgin Voyages launch new campaign featuring Gen X superstar Jennifer Lopez being used as an AI puppet to send personalised cruise invitations to lure in new customers.

The advert starts like a traditional video ad, showing Jennifer Lopez reclining on a sunbed on one of Virgin’s ships, talking to camera. But we soon learn that it’s not really Jennifer speaking, she’s being controlled by a marketing team ‘generating’ Jennifer’s delivery from a control room. And this puppet mastery is available to all customers, to create a personalized message from the superstar to invite their friends or partner to take a Virgin Voyage with them. Clever, right? We’ve seen this trend rise in the last few years, notably Wavemaker India won a Titanium Lion for our work with Cadbury Celebrations making the country’s biggest Bollywood star the brand ambassador for thousands of small shops thanks to generative AI.

I’ve chosen this campaign not only for this high-tech feature, but because it’s funny! In a world obsessed with generative AI it’s a sweet relief to have a laugh and poke fun of this obsession. It’s a perfect play when it comes to targeting the GenX audience on social media: it plays into their scepticism of the medium, it features an ambassador of their age and shows that the cruise industry is keeping up with the times and understanding how this generation is evolving (“All you need to know is that there are no kids here.”)

The campaign also nails a few fundamentals of successful influencer advertising principles. Using the paid partnership functionality on Instagram, the advert lives jointly on Virgin Voyages’ Instagram channel (538K followers) and the much larger one that JLo has cultivated (248M), multiplying the ad’s reach without duplication. The second great feature is longevity: Jennifer Lopez has been a brand ambassador for Virgin Voyages since 2021, and we’re increasing seeing the benefits of longer term partnerships when working with creators on social media.

Lastly, social media channels are a place where customers, and GenX over index for this, come to connect with loved ones, be entertained and learn new things. So taking a familiar face and approaching the advert with humour and self-awareness is the ideal way to win people a GenX audience on this platform.