 If you think back to last year at this time, the very sleepy travel category was suddenly thrust into the like center of this political divide. We were all worried about something happening that we couldn't overcome. But luckily it stayed as bad or as good as it's always been. Remember, mom is a kayak denier, so please don't bring it up. Bring what up? Kayak? Excuse me? Do the research, Tide. I'm Paul Cailloso, the chief creative at Supernatural. My win and I am a freelance executive producer. Nat Clark and I am the VP of North American Marketing for Kayak. So you want to start by telling me a little bit about how the campaign originally came together, what was kind of the inspiration for it? So coming out of the pandemic, every travel brand in the world is trying to figure out the right tone to strike, the right balance. Last year, around this exact time, people would start traveling for fun again and the pandemic was essentially quote-unquote over. What we did is say, what's culturally relevant in this moment? What are people talking about? What's a different way to market a travel brand? And that's really where the insight for deniers came from. In a world where nobody can seemingly agree on anything. Why not kayak? Why not meta-search? Why not what we do as a product? And that's really sort of the insight. Were there any challenges in kind of striking the right tone for something like this? We had to look at all of the directors and really study their reels and understand the tone of directors because within the realm of comedy, there's just so many variances. I come from a family where I tend to be liberal-leaning, but the rest of my family or my extended family are not at all. And so I was constantly running it by them, saying like, is this still funny? Do you feel made fun of? Do you see both sides? Just a light focus group of making sure that we were staying on a semi-impartial side. We had to make sure that the tone was right, but funny at the same time. Once you start studying reels, it becomes obvious who's got the right exact tone for this. We were very sure, and I think we will be until the end of time, that people will love to argue on the internet. What's your working relationship like with Supernatural and how did that kind of feed the success of the ad? I think they have a similar sort of mentality to what kayak does in regards to taking the work super seriously and not taking yourself super seriously. They're an amazing client. All the things you dream about, they know that they're in a bit of a tough fight to travel categories, tough to put out something different. And kayak has a chance to sort of be the voice of truth instead of just showing images of people having a transformative trip. We're always balancing and going back and forth with the fact that we want to be bold and we want to go out with work that we're gonna be proud of and that's gonna get people talking. We're basically making cultural commentary. There were some AI tools used to kind of tap into that zeitgeist. Can you talk a little bit about how that worked as well? AI can do a lot of things quicker than what humans can. The Facebook AI or the Instagram AI is trained on you. So every second it's learning you and it's getting better at you. This one was trained in advertising. Essentially the last 25 years of all knowledge. And then on top of that, it's fed a constant stream of data. Social data, search data, first party data. So that's the strategic process where it can go fast on audience insights and what's the best strategy to reach the target? Who's the best target? Through the creative process, it's absolutely terrible at ideas. It can only regurgitate what it's seen. By nature, advertising needs to feel new and fresh and different and never seen before. So we don't use it for ideas. We use people for that. But it can help co-create. It can generate images. It can fix copywriting. It can spit out SEO optimized things immediately. The way Photoshop works for art directors, this AI works for the people at Supernatural. It is a tool. This has done more for getting to, arriving at and selling very different work than anything I've seen. Were you surprised by the reaction that the ads got? Honestly, yes. I was expecting a good amount of positive and a good amount of negative. And we got more positive comments on Twitter far fewer negative comments than we would have expected. It did present both sides in a way that I at least found irritating. To me, the boyfriend's condescending. And obviously the mom has like a stereotypical reaction. Open your eyes. Everyone was playing their role, the stereotypical role. People understood and appreciated what we were trying to do. And there was a lot of very positive sentiment, positive feedback on the spot. That was a great feeling.