AI Assisted Creative Helps Turn an Invisible Danger into Impactful Awareness
How suspenseful story-telling and an AI powered approach helped save lives – one CO detector at a time.
Background
Carbon monoxide is a silent killer—odorless, colorless, and often overlooked. To capture attention and save lives, the Minnesota Department of Public Safety (MDPS) and the State Fire Marshal partnered with our team to engage audiences who ignore traditional PSAs to deliver a potential life-saving message.
Challenge
This project brought a set of unique challenges. CO detectors themselves are visually unremarkable — an ordinary white device— not the most engaging visual. But there were other challenges as well, including:
- Carbon Monoxide is invisible and has no scent
- Several scenarios that could pose a threat needed to be represented, including homes, garages, boats, and campers
- The ads needed to be flexible – and produced in multiple languages to reach Minnesota’s diverse communities
Solution
The team reimagined safety education through cinematic storytelling launching a suspense-themed public awareness campaign. It used classic horror tropes and artificial intelligence to expose a real danger hiding in plain sight.
The campaign theme “The Real Killer Is Carbon Monoxide,” used AI-assisted animation. Each ad built tension like a scary movie—creaking floors, eerie music, a shadowy villain — before revealing the true killer wasn’t a monster at all, but carbon monoxide.
AI-generated animation was merged with cinematic lighting, sound design, and classic horror pacing. The tone was spooky but not gory—visually rich and memorable. AI was used to create illustrative, stylized settings that blended realism and fantasy, allowing the team to produce multiple scenarios quickly, affordably, while maintaining creative consistency.
After concept approval, our creative team and production partner used an iterative process with AI. We generated static images as the foundation for prompts, then developed specific prompts to create each scene for our videos. Our production partner animated these images using various AI/animation video tools and edited them together.
We also used AI still images for static ads and leveraged AI voiceover and sound effects in the videos and audio spot. Our creative and production teams assembled all assets, making the final decisions to ensure the ads were attention-grabbing and relevant.
This creative twist reframed a familiar message in an unforgettable way, urging Minnesotans to check and install CO detectors. The campaign ran statewide across digital video, audio, social, display, and real-world placements such as fuel stations and billboards. It also engaged high-risk and multi-lingual audiences through culturally adapted creative and targeted placements. The campaign stood out for its distinctive creative approach and statewide reach, proving that innovative storytelling can drive meaningful awareness around life-saving information.
Results
Not only were 2,500 carbon monoxide detectors distributed and installed in Minnesota communities helping to protect families and raise awareness, the campaign also delivered outstanding performance across multiple channels achieving remarkable reach, engagement, and cost efficiency:
- Total Estimated Impressions over-delivered by 30%
Video Views over-delivered by 8%
Display CPM was 52% below industry benchmarks
PR – News coverage on several local TV stations
Services Included
Creative
Production
Media Strategy, Planning, & Buying
Content Strategy, Community & Ads Mgmt
Campaign Structure
Channel Planning
Paid Search
Paid Social
Analytics/ Reporting
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