GuacAImole

In partnership with

Happy Thursday, Collaborators!

The most difficult time in my career was my first few months in marketing.

I left a medical research job to become the marketing director of a media startup. I knew nothing about marketing, but I was suddenly in charge of a five-person team. Worse, the company was struggling.

During some very long nights and weekends, Hubspot’s blog, templates, and academy taught me the basics of marketing.

My team and I used those lessons to increase our site traffic (our primary KPI) by 75% in three months.

Ten years later, I started Possaible to help other marketers teach themselves AI marketing. It is an honor and a full-circle moment to welcome Hubspot as a sponsor! You can get their free guide to ChatGPT prompts at the end of this email.

-Mariah

This email was entirely written by humans who love creative marketing campaigns and avocados.

GuacAImole 

What day do people eat the most guacamole?

Super Bowl Sunday. Americans were expected to eat 54 million avocados (30,000 truckloads) on Super Bowl Sunday alone.

The Super Bowl accounts for around 20% of annual avocado sales. It’s no wonder that Avocados From Mexico runs major campaigns around the Super Bowl. This year, they turned to AI to make their promotions particularly special.

The Brand

Avocados From Mexico is a marketing non-profit that increases demand for avocados grown in Mexico (particularly in the United States). The company’s parent organization represents 40,000 orchards and hundreds of importers and distributors.

Since their founding in 2013, Avocados From Mexico has doubled the number of avocados imported from Mexico to the US. They were also named the Most Innovative Branding Company of 2021 by Fast Company.

Historically, Avocados From Mexico has created some of the funniest, weirdest, and edgiest Super Bowl ads.

However, the brand decided to sit out the $7 million commercial slot this year to focus on college football’s Cure Bowl—and a unique AI campaign.

The Solution

In a year of mediocre Super Bowl commercials, the best way to win was not to play.

Instead of a TV spot, Avocados From Mexico created GuacAImole, a generative AI platform that allows users to create unique guacamole recipes.

To create a recipe, users upload a picture of the ingredients they have, provide a picture of their finished guacamole, or answer a few questions. GuacAImole uses GPT-4 vision to recognize the images, GPT-4 text to generate text, and DALL-E to create an image of the custom guacamole.

While AI is generating the users’ results, the app displays a loading screen with fun facts about avocados.

I fed GuacAImole the image at the top of this newsletter, and it generated a recipe for a “zesty garden guacamole” that used the cucumber, chili pepper, and basil.

The recipe card started with a custom AI generated image and description. Then, it listed ingredients, instructions, and a few pairings for the finished guacamole:

The generator mistook the corn in the picture for pine nuts, which could make for an interesting guacamole. The app includes a disclaimer that Avocados From Mexico “can’t guarantee the deliciousness of every recipe.”

The Results

While it is still early days, the campaign has already racked up millions of impressions on social media—for a fraction of the cost of a traditional Super Bowl campaign.

The Takeaway

We talk a lot about how important it is to find creative uses of AI in this newsletter. Avocados From Mexico took this concept a step further, eshewing traditional advertising formats to build their own AI platform. They saved money and created a buzzworthy campaign as a result.

Another unique feature of the campaign is its loading screen. Using weird facts about avocados to engage users decreases frustration and the chances that users will navigate away as the app is generating their recipe. Think about how you can use traditional methods to reduce friction and moments of boredom in your AI experiences.