Colenso BBDO, the New Zealand-based ad agency, has a history of capturing global attention from the edge of the world through its boundary-pushing campaigns. They’ve mastered the art of creating campaigns that blend mischief and ingenuity and, most recently, AI technology with HeyGen.
For its client, Skinny Mobile, the much-loved telecommunications provider in New Zealand, Colenso launched The Unlimited Spokesperson, a marketing campaign that not only sparked conversations but also celebrated its most enthusiastic customers. Through The Unlimited Spokesperson, Colenso set out to find Skinny's happiest customer, digitally clone them, and turn them into a brand ambassador in exchange for a lifetime of free calls and texts.
The search led them to Liz, a die-hard Skinny customer who lived off the beaten track in Kerikeri and had previously worked as a telecoms engineer. She was the ideal person for the campaign.
The search for the right AI platform
For Colenso, finding the ideal technology wasn’t as straightforward as finding the ideal spokesperson. Under the expert guidance of Creature Post, the team put a number of AI tools to the test, incorporating HeyGen as part of their winning formula to power its campaign.
“HeyGen’s an invaluable part of our toolkit in bringing the campaign to life. It’s amazing in social, and we’ve blended it extensively into our TVC production process,” said Anna Flaws, Lead Integrated Producer at Colenso.
For Colenso, simply being able to test the enterprise licence before committing made all the difference. As Anna shares, “Our account manager, Cathal, was able to set us up with a trial, which made things so much easier. From our trial, we were confident that HeyGen Enterprise was going to do what we needed it to do before we made the big purchase.”
Plus, the ease and simplicity of the platform sealed the deal. “We’ve been able to work on grading and lighting in the right way to integrate HeyGen so it looks both cinematic and natural. Everyone’s been really impressed with the outputs,” says Hadleigh Sinclair, Creative Director at Colenso.
After landing on the right mix of technology, they used HeyGen’s studio avatar and instant avatar technology to create a highly flexible and easy-to-use digital clone of Liz — the new face of Skinny Mobile. In addition to HeyGen, they’ve built a powerful toolkit using Flux for wild backgrounds, Topaz for upscaling, Runway, plus a range of other tools housed in a Comfy UI to bring all the pieces together. This let them transform Liz into whatever they imagined — a Viking, football coach, astronaut, newscaster, you name it. Skinny loved it, audiences got it, and Liz’s call to “make it weirder” kept Colenso pushing the creative boundaries.
Creating the playbook for successful campaigns with AI
Colenso found themselves in the unusual position of having technology that worked too well. Hadleigh shares, “It's really hard to tell the difference between the AI version of Liz and the real Liz, unless you know what you're looking for. We actually ended up putting the HeyGen outputs back through Runway so that we could kind of get that overall AI aesthetic again and be more upfront about our use of AI.”
The outcome left both Skinny and Liz equally impressed. Skinny's team didn't just approve the campaign—they championed it, immediately recognising its breakthrough potential for the brand and unique use case for AI. Liz watched her digital self evolve into something beyond what she’d imagined, transforming from Skinny ambassador to cultural conversation starter.
Part of what set this campaign apart was HeyGen's ability to solve a persistent challenge in leveraging AI: character consistency. Where previous platforms resulted in avatars that looked slightly different from scene to scene, HeyGen helped Colenso achieve a seamless character presence that maintained Liz's essence whether she appeared as a professional newsreader or an astronaut.
For Colenso, the campaign wasn’t just about using AI for the sake of using AI—it was about pushing the boundaries of creativity, embracing the weird, and even starting to write the playbook for how AI is used in New Zealand. The campaign was impactful largely because it celebrated AI, inviting audiences into a conversation about creative possibilities rather than trying to hide it. And perhaps the biggest indicator of the campaign’s success is the audience’s openness to AI—when it’s done the right way, of course—as Colenso continues to brainstorm creatively impactful and ambitious ideas for its clients.
