AI Startup Perplexity Drops Hollywood-Caliber Fake Movie Trailer as Its First Ad

Perplexity, a generative artificial intelligence startup with a $1 billion valuation and a big-swing mentality, launched its first paid marketing campaign during tonight’s high-profile National Basketball Association Finals.

The seven-figure media buy—during a tentpole broadcast that draws sizable audiences and blue-chip brands—aims to plant Perplexity’s flag with mainstream America in the burgeoning tech space.

While the placement is noteworthy for a nascent company, so is the creative itself. 

The brand, which is developing a search engine that aims to rival Google, has taken an unconventional route to introducing itself, dropping a movie-style trailer for an action thriller that doesn’t exist. (But as a preview: It might in the future, as talks have started for potential TV series or full-length features based on the concept.)

Perplexity chief business officer Dmitry Shevelenko called the marketing move “an asymmetrical bet.”

“If we take a bunch of easy shots and not the threes, we’re not going to win this game,” Shevelenko, leaning into an apt basketball analogy, told ADWEEK. “We’re swimming in a sea of giants—trillion dollar companies—so we can’t just tow in. We have to be willing to be bold.”

The spot, called “The Know-It Alls,” comes from Los Angeles-based indie agency Sandwich. It borrows a formula that’s well known in the ad industry, with tweaks and an AI assist, nodding to classic branded content like BMW Films and Mercedes-Benz’s “Lucky Star.”

On-screen branding is intentionally light in “The Know-It Alls,” yet Perplexity drives the narrative in the high-energy scenario. The video’s 30-second cutdown aired on ABC during the first quarter of game one of the NBA Finals, while the full two-minute video will be distributed on Disney-owned streaming channels.

Tweaking a formula

The kernel of the idea came from the brand and one of its unofficial slogans, “Know It All,” according to Adam Lisagor, founder of Sandwich.

“They said, ‘We don’t want to make an ad for Perplexity, we want to make a trailer for a movie that doesn’t exist—something about discovery, where the characters subtly use our platform, but the brand is barely present,’” Lisagor told ADWEEK. “To which I said, ‘Where have you been all my life?’”

Aware of how often the setup has been used in advertising—CeraVe, Taco Bell and Tourism Australia, to name a few recent examples—creatives looked for ways to make the ad distinctive.

“We’ve seen this tactic a million times, and you can always tell it’s a fake trailer—all the signals are there that it’s a parody,” Lisagor said. “We needed this to feel real so people would think it’s plausibly a real movie.”

That approach reflects the brand’s DNA and the message it’s trying to get across, per Shevelenko.

“If you put something out there that’s a little ambiguous but enjoyable to watch, it should spark curiosity, which is core to our brand,” Shevelenko said. “If people ask questions like, ‘What did I just see?,’ then we’ll consider it a success.”

The spot’s entertainment value could lend itself to social shares and earned media, he said, which will be another yardstick to measure the campaign.

Iconic inspiration

The commercial, shot in two days in Nashville, Tenn., centers on a ragtag group of inventor-troublemakers that bands together for a common purpose. There is a main character who has fallen from grace and is itching for a comeback. Their goal is to beat the system for the betterment of society.

If all those elements sound like well-worn movie tropes, there’s a good reason for that. Lisagor used Perplexity as a “thought partner” to curate popular entertainment tropes and organize the threads of the story.

Sandwich worked with a frequent collaborator, filmmaker Seth Worley, as director, and Lisagor wrote the script with colleague Joshua Allen, with input from Perplexity. Inspiration included seminal projects like BMW Films and “1984,” for which “Apple hired Ridley Scott to make a trailer for a fake movie,” Lisagor said.

The agency, with a raft of tech clients, specializes in ads that speak to laymen, breaking down complicated products and services into everyday language. The work for Perplexity gave the team a new challenge and a “significantly high bar” to clear, per Lisagor.

Coming attractions

The partners are already working on more content, which will capture the spirit of “The Know-It Alls” but hop around in different genres with new scripts and characters. Meanwhile, “The Know-It Alls” has interest from two Hollywood studios with an eye to develop the original intellectual property as a film or series, Shevelenko said. (Creatives made up their own banner, Sonar Studios, for the ad and tagged the trailer with, “this film is not yet real,” a play on “this film is not yet rated,” in the end credits.)

As part of the current campaign, the Silicon Valley company is mulling out-of-home ads that pose questions and include a QR code to find answers via its services.

Perplexity—which recently added $63 million in series-B funds for a total of $165 million in investments—is courting marketers and building its own ad business. It already counts Universal McCann, Snowflake, McCann Worldgroup, Zoom, HP, Paytm and the NBA’s Cleveland Cavaliers among the users of its Enterprise Pro chatbot.

As those discussions continue, Shevelenko said it was important to flex Perplexity’s own creative muscles with its first campaign.

“To be credible as a platform, we need to be credible as a creator,” Shevelenko said. “That informed us in going with a riskier approach.”