Inside the Campaign: How US Bank Used Artificial Intelligence to Fast-Track Its Latest Ads

U.S. Bank has been around for 161 years, but its latest campaign is as modern as it gets, utilizing artificial intelligence to get it to market in less than four months.

The campaign, “The Power of Us,” is the first under chief marketing officer Michael Lacorazza, who has been in the position for seven months. Lacorazza tapped New York-based agency Supernatural AI (formerly Supernatural), instead of McCann, which U.S. Bank named its creative agency of record in 2020, to head up the campaign, and AI was utilized in the strategy to help speed up the process.

The campaign is centered around a hero film and three subsequent spots that tell the stories of what U.S. Bank, its employees and its clients can achieve together, including putting children through college or reaching retirement.

The bank created versions of the films in both English and Spanish, and viewers may recognize the voice of actor Jake Gyllenhaal in the English spots.

The campaign is designed to touch on experiences that will resonate with a large range of people, from business owners to new parents, and even U.S. Bank employees and institutional bankers.  

Leaning on consumer insight

Through research and the various U.S. Bank communities, the company gained insight into its consumers and why they bank with U.S. Bank. In addition, Lacorazza gained insights of his own about the company by talking with stakeholders, and he found that the bank’s motto, “Powering Human Potential,” still resonated.

The team looked at differentiators, and a key insight was how U.S. Bank plays an important role in key moments in people’s lives, whether it’s sending their kids to college, buying a house or saving for retirement—real life, highly emotional moments.

After that, the storytelling—leaning on the stories of real customers so that consumers understand that the bank is there for them—helped form the strategy for the current campaign.

“Powering Potential” tells the U.S. Bank brand story through the moments that unite people—from clients to tellers, advisors, branch managers, commercial bankers and everyone in between. In the hero film, the audience sees the world through the eyes of real U.S. Bank employees, showing big wins and challenges.

Why use AI?

U.S. Bank decided to go with Supernatural AI to fast-track the creative and use the agency’s technology. The company has worked with McCann since 2020, and the agency is still on the U.S. Bank roster. Lacorazza said the bank works with multiple agencies for different purposes.

“We had a desire to get to market very quickly … and an efficiency play was a big part of this,” said Lacorazza.

U.S. Bank also wanted to try something new in its marketing, and using AI was an opportunity to pressure-test the new technology.

The AI used in the campaign wasn’t on the creative end. Supernatural AI came up with the creative concept, but it didn’t use AI for visual creation. Instead, the technology was used for strategy. U.S. Bank fed its data into Supernatural AI’s tech stack, and the data was turned into avatars for the customer segments and customer profiles it wanted to go after. Essentially, it was an AI version of focus groups, and it led to testing against synthetic audiences.

The rapid-fire testing through AI was able to whittle down the versions of the creative in a very short period of time, relative to human testing, which can take weeks.

The AI came about in the mid-stage process of the campaign, allowing the creative development to accelerate once it got to the human process of making decisions on the creative and adding the human elements, like the talent and the imagery. The whole process ended up taking less than four months, which Lacorazza said is astonishing, especially for a big bank that sometimes has lengthened processes.

“The name of the game for this first brand campaign was all about speed,” said Mike Barrett, chief strategy officer and co-founder of Supernatural AI. “Processes that usually take weeks, or even months, we are able to complete in a matter of days thanks to the platform we’ve built.”

Barrett continued that Supernatural AI accelerates the strategy and creative process so that its people can bring to life its clients’ visions, as it did for U.S. Bank.

Lacorazza offered some advice about brands working with AI, saying that they should “think about how you can leverage the technology to enable humans to be better at what they do, versus replacing them … In our space, human creativity is really important.” He also recommended that companies experiment with the technology, because they won’t understand it unless they work with it.

U.S. Bank has already rolled out two ads in the campaign and released versions in Spanish, as it has a large presence in the Hispanic market, especially after it merged with Union Bank last year in California, doubling its presence in the state.

Two more ads are coming in the next few weeks, along with other executional elements, social and digital and more. Lacorazza said there will be moments in the future when the bank has new product announcements, and it will pick those moments to create new work following the same creative platform.