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Red Lobster used all AI music for their latest advertising campaign (with examples)

wing said:
I feel like these aren't exactly an ad campaign and more of a social media marketing shtick, which is obviously leaning into the hoakiness of it all. (the article doesn't call it an ad campaign, so beyond journalistic and online buzz, it doesn't seem like they are running these with an ad buy on any platforms). Probably an idea by an internal social media department who are all likely under 30, not unlike how Wendy's has a popular Twitter(X) account, trying to do something intentionally quirky and comical for social media likes and attention.

I'm not trying to justify it, but in context I think it's a bit less offensive since they are obviously leaning into it as a joke and probably have almost no budget for execution, plus AI is seen as a fun toy on the cutting edge of culture (good marketing ploy) – to that end I can almost appreciate they are clearly owning it as AI rather than trying to pass it off as real music. But agree, this music is painful to listen to.

I grew up going there as my dad loved it. I remember not liking anything on the menu except the cheddar bay biscuits, which to be fair are pretty good, which I blame on all the butter and cheese lol.
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Yes, that's true, "campaign" was my translation of this, and also true we don't know more about it, how it's used ect. Maybe not precise enough to describe what's going on for sure, we make sense as we go. Red Lobster are trying AI music out it seems though, and did over 30 short adcreatives with it - which you can see and listen to on YouTube - so I figured it is an interesting little "case study" in this department, at least..
 
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Attempting to rhyme “yes” with “best” and “soft” with “laugh”? Surely they could have written a better line that actually rhymes! It doesn’t even make sense to say “how you make me laugh” about a snack, unless you’re laughing at how god-awfully bad the ads are.

Musically both ads are also all over the place. The start of some phrases land on awkward places - as if the singer started singing without hearing the backing track. The melody in the operatic music video was very strange - seemed to not know where it was going and did not link each phrase so it related to the last.

Will non composers care about unsophisticated music on an ad about a savoury snack? Probably not. And that’s a depressing thought.
 
gamma-ut said:
They're ads so I suppose annoyance is a factor the client can ignore but the artefacts, particularly in the operatic one, may wind up being a block on large-scale use. If the brand wants to push "this sounds amateur because we're so edgy"
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Soon artifacts of AI music will be normalized and seen as a good thing. Same as it happened with abused auto-tune and other cases where a tool used wrongly or a mistake in production opened the gates to new music genres. Not to mention all those 'lofi' genres full of nasty artifacts.
 
GtrString said:
Seems AI has started to eat into the advert market.. what do you think?

According to AdWeek, the big brand Red Lobster made their latest advertising campaign with AI music.
https://www.adweek.com/creativity/red-lobster-ai-songs-cheddar-bay-biscuits/#

Red Lobster put the music in 2 YouTube playlists, you can hear them here (it's the same concept, in a variety of musical genres):
https://www.youtube.com/@redlobster/playlists

Example 1:



Example 2:

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The new Trash...
 
Those trash cues are probably a cost cutting effort to pay for the allegedly huge P&L hole known as "all you can eat shrimp."

Anyone should know that offering bottomless crustaceans on the menu in the gluttonous US restaurant market is a recipe for failure.
 
I think this is appropriate to remember:

First They Came by Pastor Martin Niemöller

First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist
Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me

All these companies chortling as they replace previous paid workers with AI, not realizing that AI will eat itself up the chain of command until there's just one guy left at the top...who will of course also be outsourced by an AI...

Seriously wtf? As a society we have never created a fair economic system, and now the inequalities multiply by the day. Money will be worthless because no one will have any but the rich, and they won't be able to spend it anywhere because there will be nowhere to spend it where human beings work.

Maybe a bit rough in explanation but I'm sure we are headed off a cliff.
 
sean8877 said:
I'd already decided not to eat red sea cockroaches long ago. But this has definitely sealed the deal.
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Honestly tho...those biscuits are delish. So good a few months ago I even bought their box of ingredients to make it at home.

But at this rate no composers will have any $$ to buy them, so cut off the nose to spite the face?
 
GtrString said:
Yes, that's true, "campaign" was my translation of this, and also true we don't know more about it, how it's used ect. Maybe not precise enough to describe what's going on for sure, we make sense as we go. Red Lobster are trying AI music out it seems though, and did over 30 short adcreatives with it - which you can see and listen to on YouTube - so I figured it is an interesting little "case study" in this department, at least..
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oh yeah and no worries, I wasn't trying to be that guy picking apart semantics - I was just relieved after digging into the article a bit that it seems more like a goofy experiment for social media where they are very knowingly leaning into it as a joke (as opposed to if they happened to do a huge budget broadcast campaign and wanted to hire a composer but were to cheap to do so did AI instead hoping no one would notice kind of thing). So in this case I find it less threatening being more of a comical thing designed for whoever the hell subscribes to a corporate restaurant YouTube channel (probably mostly other bots lol).
 
marclawsonmusic said:
Does anyone else find it hard to listen to these? Like nails-on-chalkboard hard to listen? Cause this 'music' creeps me the fuck out.
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It’s particularly terrible, with no sense of direction. What I don’t like about AI music is not the music itself, but getting to know that there’s so many people that does not give a f about quality as long as the music is free
 
mikrokosmiko said:
It’s particularly terrible, with no sense of direction. What I don’t like about AI music is not the music itself, but getting to know that there’s so many people that does not give a f about quality as long as the music is free
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I agree. And a part of what I find so hilarious about this campaign is that it's so bad ... and yet just plausible enough ... that it seems almost a parody of just how vacuous corporate music can be.

But there's a broader context to the devaluation of music to all of this. When music is just a commodity on tap, discoveable by the most vacuously homogenizing social media, when you can no longer give someone an album as gift of something meaningful, when you no longer sit down to discover a truly great new record or CD in your room that (even just by merit of having traveled to the record store) you're invested in ... music in such commercial environs is already vulnerable to be evacuated of the context that gives it meaning.

Of course, Film music as some context to secure meaning already build in, (assuming it's a decent enough film).

And a lot of corporate campaign music (that I ... guess? ... this is maybe parodying?) is already vacuous by design - even if the actual music itself might be ok (and not just designed for "least offensive common denominator") the commercial context is often explicitly designed to erode and replace the kind of meaningful human context of music.


And yet ... with the technology we have ... surely there has to be ways of finding new spaces to be discovered to try and (re)create such meaningful spaces as (I imagine) sitting down with a brand new copy of Sgt Pepper on a record player must have been like.
 
I will admit when writing articles, sometimes I have used mid journey to create the cover art.

I am no different to any of these folks who may come along and use udio.com to generate some background music for whatever.

When I do it, I honestly don't care too much about how the art looks, as long as it works for the article.

I'm a hypocrite, and I'm part of the problem because I am doing the same thing to visual artists as others will now do to composers.

It's a particularly vicious issue, because on the one hand, creators need quick art or music to bang out an article or a video, and they often don't have the budget to pay an artist much if anything. That's capitalism 101 - get 'er done as cheap as poss.

On the other hand, it's this very behavior that is going to hurt us all.

I don't have any good answers. I bleed for us composers, and for the visual artists I myself have been helping to put out of work. It's all insidious and horrible and I feel bad about it. I don't know what the answers are.
 
No need to be discouraged imo - I think it's still art, if you make the music sound good, AI or not.

Music requires a heavy dose of craftsmanship, musicianship, taste, finesse and cultural sensitivity, and making these AI tools work in context of music is also an art, it's difficult.

Watch Adam Neely jam to the Red Lobster videos, and roast AI with the Turing Test:

 
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