Chookie swaps AI ads for handmade 'Chookie Air' with Gopuff
Chookie, a snack brand from New Jersey, just swapped its awkward AI-generated ads for a quirky, handmade campaign, and it paid off.
Their old AI ads fell flat with misspelled words and weird visuals, so they teamed up with Gopuff to launch "Chookie Air," a playful fake airline that feels much more down-to-earth.
Handmade 'Chookie Air' gained 12x followers
The new campaign features cardboard airplanes and a treehouse HQ inhabited by a pair of hand puppet animals: think pure DIY vibes.
Founder Zev Ziegler shared that this hands-on approach brought in around 12 times more social media followers than its AI ads, despite putting in roughly the same amount of time and investment.
As Chookie founder Zev Ziegler put it in a press release, "We started noticing consumers weren't rewarding polish the way brands thought they were. They were rewarding effort. Humor. Tiny human decisions. When we compared the performance of our handmade work against AI-generated creative, the difference wasn't subtle."
Looks like people really do prefer real over robotic.