Custom GenAI Models for Telco VMO2

With Bubl, O2 joined a long list of brands that make use of a brand character in their marketing. The small blue robot, created to symbolise the network that is always with you, has a superpower that Tony the Tiger, the Pillsbury Doughboy or the Smash Martians could never have imagined - Bubl can be generated by an AI tool faith has built. Brand mascots are often created to increase brand warmth and iconicity, yet are constrained to high-budget campaigns. The tool significantly reduces asset creation costs by 97% and shrinks timelines from days to minutes, freeing up producers’ bandwidth. This allows us to significantly enhance Bubl's presence across digital platforms and endow him with a more compelling personality to help communicate O2's core values of See What You Can Do... The Bubl Generator is a custom-trained image model based on Stable Diffusion. By using simple text prompts we can generate images of Bubl in almost any fathomable context, giving creatives a lot more creative freedom. We learnt that we needed to custom-train the model using images of Bubl from numerous unconventional perspectives (e.g. from behind) to closely control our output. To achieve this we integrated a ‘digital twin’ of Bubl into Unreal Engine, allowing us to animate him in dynamic and novel poses. The Copy Checker allows O2’s copywriters to simply paste in text to get detailed feedback and suggestions. This model was trained specifically on the brand’s extensive tone-of-voice documentation and evaluates against specific metrics co-developed with the Head of Copy and Tone for Virgin Media O2 to ensure brand-compliant messaging. The tool was built to incorporate all of O2’s guidelines and legal requirements, streamlining a complex process and ensuring quick, efficient and consistent results. The project has enhanced the quality and reach of O2’s content, setting a new industry standard for leveraging brand mascots and marks a progression from mere AI concepting and into creating brand compliant usable work.