At Agoda, we love a challenge, and taking on a new technology is no exception. Welcome to Part Three of our AI in Creativity series, where Jennifer Jones (Global Brand Creative Senior Manager) shares how the Brand Creative team experiments with GenAI to boost creativity, streamline our processes, and do more with the resources we have.
Within the Agoda Brand Creative team, we’ve always defined creativity by the quality of our ideas and executions. But over the past year, that definition has expanded. Creativity now includes how we solve problems, how we build systems, and how we empower teams to think differently. AI didn’t just help us scale content creation. It helped us reimagine what creativity could look like.
After our early success with AI-powered video production, we started asking bigger questions. What if we could go beyond templated work? Could we create emotional, insight-driven, live-action-style campaigns entirely in-house?
We didn’t just want more content. We wanted better content. Content that feels local, personal, and real. And we wanted to do it fast. It was an ambitious leap.
Traditionally, this type of work requires hundreds of thousands of dollars, lengthy timelines, and the help of external production agencies. Now, with the help of AI, we’re doing it in-house, faster, at a fraction of the cost, and producing some of our most exciting creative work to date.
Our new era of creative production
Here are a few projects we’re especially proud of, showing how AI has elevated our creative work, from ideation to final assets:
A holiday tale brought to life by AI
When our team was challenged to produce a fully animated video using only AI, we rose to the occasion. Just in time for the December holidays, we debuted Leo’s Magical Travel Adventures, a short film celebrating cultural curiosity and the joy of shared experiences.
Featuring AI-crafted visuals and voiceovers, the film follows Leo, a little boy who journeys through Guangzhou in China, Rotorua in New Zealand and the floating markets of Ayutthaya in Thailand before arriving at Udaipur in India. At each stop, he learns something about the local culture, taking in a traditional Lion Dance, learning about the Haka, and sampling Guay Tiew Ruea before landing amidst the colorful spectacle of the Holi Festival.
What we’re especially proud of is how much our employees and their families loved it! Externally, the campaign also captured widespread attention, earning impressive media coverage and sparking meaningful conversations with global viewers.
Hyper-local social media ads at scale
One video in under two minutes. That’s how quickly we can now produce performance marketing ads. In fact, we’ve created more than 4,200 unique, personalised advertisement videos at that pace. This is the scale and speed we’ve achieved by integrating AI into our creative process.
How did we do it? Using a custom GPT, we built precise interest lists and combined internal and external signals to create highly localized, targeted ads. Then, with the help of AI and automation tools, we brought these concepts to life, producing images, footage, music, and voiceovers at a previously unimaginable scale.
Turning cultural insights into campaign wins
The Brand team at Agoda manages campaigns across many global markets, especially in Asia, where each market has its own unique holidays and cultural nuances. To keep up, we need to move fast without losing local relevance. That’s where AI really steps in as our creative partner.
For example, take the work we did for Japan’s Golden Week: the market’s biggest travel season. Using GenAI, we quickly produced a series of ads featuring realistic footage and natural voiceovers, with support from native Japanese speakers to ensure authenticity. These ads were designed to be emotional and culturally relevant for the target audience. The results? These ads had a better lift in awareness and a higher view-through rate than other local campaigns running at the same time.
AI meets ASMR
Inspired by the growing popularity of ASMR in Japan, we tapped into the world of soothing sounds for a social media campaign. We created a series of localized videos that paired AI-generated visuals with soothing audio, a combination that proved highly effective. The results spoke for themselves: the campaign outperformed others in the market, delivering higher view-through rates and lower cost-per-click than concurrent local campaigns.
Time and time again, the AI-generated creatives matched or outperformed our traditional ads—and even when they didn’t, each experiment taught us something new, helping us improve the next iteration.
Customizing our tools
To power our creative work, we’ve built numerous custom GPTs and agents tailored to our needs. These tools have dramatically sped up our process. They take us from the original idea, script, and storyboard to detailed frame-by-frame prompts in minutes. We’ve also implemented AI-driven quality assurance checks to flag potential issues in voiceover pronunciation, image generation, and brand alignment.
The team behind the change
The biggest shift for our team has been in our mindset. We started working with AI as a small experiment, but the undeniable value of these tools quickly changed our perspective. With generative AI, our imagination is no longer limited by traditional tools or budget constraints.
As a team, we can drive creative projects that were previously impossible to tackle in-house. Our designers and copywriters have discovered new ways of creating and collaborating, and AI has become a catalyst for cross-functional teamwork and shared creative ownership.
This transformation didn’t happen overnight. But two years in, the change is undeniable. We’re more empowered, more experimental, and more confident than ever in the quality and artistry of our work.
In the next and final post in this series, I’ll share some of my top learnings from this journey, along with insights and tips from Agoda’s very own designers and copywriters. Whether you’re just starting to explore AI or looking to scale your efforts, I hope our advice will help you to move faster, stay creative, and make art that you can be proud of.
Catch up on the AI in Creativity series
Part One: Why Agoda’s Brand Team Chose to Explore AI in Creativity
Part Two: What Agoda’s Brand Team Learned from Their Early AI Experiments
Part Three: How Agoda’s Brand Team Scaled Video Output 10x Using AI
Part Four: How Agoda’s Brand Team Found Creative Freedom with AI (You’re here!)
About the Author
Jennifer Jones is a Global Brand Creative Senior Manager at Agoda.
