Colenso BBDO, the New Zealand-based ad agency, have a history of capturing global attention from the edge of the world through their boundary-pushing campaigns. They have mastered the art of generating 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 started 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 transform them into a brand ambassador in exchange for a lifetime of free calls and texts.
The search brought 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 perfect person for the campaign.
The search for the right AI platform
For Colenso, finding the perfect technology was not as straightforward as finding the perfect 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 quite effective on 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 was quite a turning point. 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 sure 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 settled the decision. “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 quite impressed with the outputs,” says Hadleigh Sinclair, Creative Director at Colenso.
After landing on the right mix of technology, they leveraged 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 have created a quite powerful toolkit leveragingFlux for wild backgrounds, Topaz for upscaling, Runway, along with a range of other tools housed in a Comfy UI to bring all the pieces together. This enabled them to transform Liz into whatever creativity they dreamt up—a Viking, football coach, astronaut, newscaster, you name it. Skinny loved it, the audiences got it, and Liz’s directive to ‘make it weirder’ kept Colenso pushing the creative boundaries.
Creating the guide 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 usage of AI.’
The outcome left both Skinny and Liz equally impressed. Skinny's team did not just approve the campaign—they championed it, instantly recognising its breakthrough potential for the brand and distinctive use case for AI. Liz witnessed her digital self evolve into something beyond her imagination, 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 was not just about using AI for the sake of using AI—it was about pushing creative boundaries, embracing the unusual, and even beginning to shape the playbook for how AI is used in New Zealand. The campaign was quite impactful largely because it celebrated AI, inviting audiences into a conversation about creative possibilities rather than trying to conceal it. And perhaps the clearest indicator of the campaign’s success is the audience’s openness to AI—when used in the right way, of course—as Colenso continue to brainstorm creatively impactful and ambitious ideas for their clients.
