Qatar Airways has condensed that familiar narrative arc into a three-minute spot. In the video, Jodi, a model and actor, bumps into a stranger as he steps out of a car. It’s a typical Hollywood love-at-first-sight moment, but she’s soon pulled away by her friend, losing an earring in the process. The man spends the next three months globetrotting on Qatar-chartered flights trying to find her.

But there’s a twist. The brand is inviting viewers insert themselves into scenes from the video through the use of facial-scanning software and AI.

The campaign, which rolled out last week, began with a standard audience engagement effort and organically evolved to include an AI component, according to Babar Rahman, the brand’s senior vice president of global marketing. “The whole idea of the campaign was … How do we bring people into a world where they can bring travel and love together?,” Rahman tells The Drum. “AI was just an element which helped us deliver that narrative.”

The system, Rahman says, was designed to reject images of celebrities or public figures. After uploading their images, users are given the option of choosing between a variety of skin tones for their personalized characters.

Users must also consent to a long terms of service agreement before submitting images of their likenesses to Qatar Airways’ servers. And, in an effort to preserve user privacy, Rahman says that the brand permanently deletes those images as well as the personalized videos 24 hours after they’re generated.

This isn’t Qatar’s first marketing foray into trendy technologies. At the height of the metaverse craze in early 2022, the brand launched an interactive digital experience, dubbed QVerse, designed to provide customers with a virtual glimpse of what a physical travel experience through Doha’s Hamad International Airport and aboard a Qatar Airways flight might look like. Visitors to the QVerse are guided by Sama, a virtual flight attendant who received an AI upgrade earlier this year, enabling the character to engage in back-and-forth dialogue.

The new ’AI Adventure’ campaign, Rahman says, is a continuation of the same branding effort that was put into QVerse. “We are on a path to trial new technology in a way that is engaging and in a way that portrays our brand as innovative,” he says.

In his view, such efforts are essential for corporate survival in this era of rapid and profound technological evolution. “In the new generation where everybody’s tech-savvy, to some extent, we believe that any brand that’s not using technology to enhance their messaging and narrative will be left behind,” he says. “We want to make sure that we’re on top of it, that we’re using the latest tech available to us [and that we] deploy it in a way that feels natural and is also core to the DNA of our own brand.”

’AI Adventure’ was developed in partnership with McCann Worldgroup, Qatar Airways’ partner agency.

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