Colenso BBDO, the New Zealand-based ad agency, has a track record of capturing global attention from the edge of the world through its boundary-pushing campaigns. They have mastered the art of creating campaigns that blend mischief with 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, create their digital clone, 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 was not 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 is an invaluable part of our toolkit in bringing the campaign to life. It works brilliantly on social, and we have integrated 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 a huge 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 would do what we needed it to do before we made the big purchase.”
Plus, the ease and simplicity of the platform clinched the deal. “We’ve been able to work on grading and lighting in the right way to integrate HeyGen so that it looks both cinematic and natural. Everyone has been really impressed with the outputs,” says Hadleigh Sinclair, Creative Director at Colenso.
After arriving at 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 have put together a powerful toolkit using Flux 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 allowed them to transform Liz into whatever they imagined—a Viking, football coach, astronaut, newscaster, you name it. Skinny loved it, the audiences understood it, and Liz’s instruction to “make it weirder” kept Colenso stretching the creative boundaries.
Creating the playbook for successful AI campaigns
Colenso found themselves in the unusual position of having technology that worked almost 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 exactly what you’re looking for. We actually ended up putting the HeyGen outputs back through Runway so that we could bring back that overall AI aesthetic and be more transparent about how we were using AI.”
The outcome left both Skinny and Liz equally impressed. Skinny's team did not just approve the campaign—they championed it, immediately recognising its breakthrough potential for the brand and distinctive use case for AI. Liz watched her digital self evolve into something beyond what she had imagined, transforming from a Skinny ambassador into a catalyst for wider cultural conversation.
Part of what set this campaign apart was HeyGen's ability to solve a persistent challenge in using AI: character consistency. While earlier platforms produced avatars that looked slightly different from scene to scene, HeyGen helped Colenso achieve a seamless character presence that preserved Liz's essence, whether she appeared as a professional newsreader or as an astronaut.
For Colenso, the campaign was not just about using AI for the sake of using AI—it was about pushing the boundaries of creativity, embracing the unusual, and even beginning to define 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 conceal it. And perhaps the strongest indicator of the campaign’s success is the audience’s openness to AI—when implemented in the right way, of course—as Colenso continues to brainstorm creatively impactful and ambitious ideas for its clients.
