It is very much on-brand that the concept behind the new advertising campaign for Radio Nova’s breakfast show is fun and unapologetically silly.
Dublin commuters will have already seen the outdoor execution of its “A Pair of Mad Yolks” idea for the music station’s biggest show, Morning Glory with PJ and Jim. The posters show presenters, PJ Gallagher and Jim McCabe, as boiled eggs.
For the campaign’s next phase – an ambitious move to TV and cinema screens – the station’s agency, Bloom Advertising, animated the concept using AI. It is, says the station in its press release, “a first for Irish radio”.
Kevin Branigan, chief executive of Radio Nova and Classic Hits Radio, says: “The campaign demonstrates how merging technologies can open up new creative possibilities for advertisers and broadcasters alike.”
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He sidesteps the question of whether cost drove the execution away from traditional artist-created animation towards AI, saying “it was the most creative way to show the presenters’ fast-paced chemistry and improvisational humour as animated characters while retaining their authentic voices and personalities”.
It probably wasn’t necessary, however, to announce that the animation was created using AI. For this viewer, it looks too one dimensional to be anything else, with none of the subtlety and expressiveness of more traditional animation, while the lip syncing of the pairs’ banter seems slightly off.
But does it matter to anyone other than human creatives who will see this as yet another erosion of their earning power?
Maybe. Consumers, according to research, don’t much like their traditional media advertising to be AI generated, not least because they get quite enough AI slop on social media.
NielsenIQ (NIQ), the consumer intelligence company, found that consumers can easily identify AI-generated videos and are likely to find them more “annoying” and “confusing” than traditional ads.
That research also found that low-quality visuals in AI-generated ads “increase the cognitive effort required to process them, distracting from the intended message”.
Against that, one finding in the NIQ study that Radio Nova will find encouraging is that “by drawing from pre-existing visual and conceptual representations, AI-generated ads successfully reinforced existing brand associations”.
And that is what the station has done here. Fans of the breakfast show, which thrives on a sense of organised chaos, may not find the AI animation too jarring; they might even expect an ad for the show to be bizarre looking.
Marta Cyhan-Bowles, head of global marketing at NIQ, says: “Our neuroscience-driven approach reveals how consumers non-consciously process AI-generated content and highlights the fine line between innovation and discomfort.”
Some of that “discomfort” has already manifested itself in Irish advertising.
In 2024 Transport for Ireland apologised for a poster promotion featuring AI-generated images of classic Halloween characters. For commuters who had to look at them, they fell firmly into that “uncanny valley” description of AI images where the effect is more unsettling and difficult to look at than entertaining or amusing.
But it wasn’t a commuter backlash or even the use of AI that appeared to drive the apology. It was an attempt to calm criticism from illustrators who had publicly objected to a large advertiser not commissioning original art.
Last year Ireland’s advertising watchdog upheld a complaint against Molloy’s Liquor Stores over a series of ads for Buckfast Tonic Wine on the off-licence group’s website. The campaign featured fictitious customer testimonials.
“I drank Buckfast Tonic Wine before my job interview and I got the job! I don’t remember much of the interview, but I’m pretty sure I nailed it,” read one made-up quote from a fictional customer. The complainant to the Advertising Standards Authority (ASAI) believed the ads were in breach of the advertising code by implying “the consumption of alcohol could have improved physical performance, personal qualities or capabilities”.
Molloy’s told the ASAI that the campaign, which it quickly withdrew, had been generated by an artificial intelligence writing tool. “Its tone had been intended to be of a light, tongue-in-cheek style.”
AI is only as good as the prompts it is given and the sourcing of its references. Perhaps whatever AI tool Molloy’s was using was learning from creaky old sitcoms. How else to explain one of the “testimonies” it created: “I had a glass of Buckfast Tonic Wine before my wedding and I don’t remember saying ‘I do’ but my wife assures me that I did.”
The Molloy’s slip-up shows the pitfalls of going down the vastly cheaper AI route to create advertising without a human filter that can take a more rounded, informed view.
Radio Nova’s breakfast show holds its own in the highly competitive early morning market, due to the personalities of its presenters and its editorial strategy of keeping it a banter-filled world away from current affairs.
The station has a market share of 8.5 per cent, with 279,000 listeners in the Dublin city, county and commuter belt region. Morning Glory with PJ & Jim has 88,000 daily listeners.
Branigan says the overall budget of €200,000 for the Mad Yolks campaign was made up of media spend and media value secured via the station’s partners and that there will be several iterations of the AI animation hitting screens. Digital executions across social media platforms are also part of the year-long campaign.
Of the AI-generated animation, PJ Gallagher says: “I didn’t think it was possible to make us look any weirder than we do at six in the morning, but here we are. It’s totally surreal. You think you’ve made it in showbiz, and the next thing you know, you’re an egg shouting at people on their phones, during the ad breaks and before the movie. I love it.”
