They had no budget, no client, and no creative director to guide them. But they decided to use this to their advantage and turn it into a hook that will generate buzz. The team came up with the idea of actually building their own creative director using artificial intelligence.

AI-CD ß officially joined McCann Tokyo as creative director on April 1, 2016 along with 11 employees newly graduated from university. News of the hiring was intentionally released right before April Fool’s Day. AI-CD ß will now actually begin to be assigned clients and will work with a creative team as creative director.

News of the hiring was intentionally released right before April Fool’s Day, which sparked a debate on whether the press release was a prank. The discussion drew more attention to McCann’s new-employee welcoming ceremony. The news of AI-CD ß was covered by some 60 media outlets in over 30 countries around the world and created big news and publicity both in Japan and overseas. The news also piqued the interest of a client, who then assigned the A.I. as a creative director to its ad campaign.

The team looked at some 1,000 award-winning TV works from the past 10 years and tagged them with original tags, then broke down and analyzed them to find out what makes a good TV commercial. An algorithm was created from the result. Using this data, the world’s first artificial intelligence that can give creative direction was born. Its name was AI-CD ß. By entering the creative brief, AI-CD ß will write out the best creative direction for the campaign.

The mission of McCann Worldgroup is to be the #1 creatively-driven marketing company. To approach this mission in a completely new way, a group of young creators came together to form the McCann Millennials.