Amazon Brings Books to Life, and More Great Work From Europe

Plus: GEO pictures extinct species and Axe clears the air

We love the drama of this Amazon Books campaign, where characters and whole worlds lie inert, mid-action, until some reader picks up where they’ve left off. It’s a nice way to illustrate what the act of being immersed in a book so often feels like. This is “Bring a Book to Life” by Droga5 London.

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For GEO Magazine, BETC Fullsix in France wanted to draw attention to human-driven extinction. To do this, they used AI to create photo-realistic images of animals gone extinct ages ago (also courtesy of us). The images will appear in a special issue of GEO that goes live on Aug. 6.

More details appear in the video below, but we’re highlighting it because this wasn’t a lazy-AI creative job. There’s no way for AI to reliably “know” (and thus generate) anything about creatures we haven’t trained them to “see,” because they’ve been gone too long. GEO and BETC compiled a multidisciplinary team of journalists, creatives, biologists and paleontologists to gather reliable intel on these species. Then they fed it to the agency’s proprietary AI image generation tool Vermeer, aiming to reproduce the “true appearance” of these animals “organ by organ.” The results yield the campaign’s name, “Impossible Shots.”

Tiphaine du Plessis, president at BETC Fullsix, says, “Here we have put AI at the service of life and scientific truth.”

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For Axe’s new Cherry Fizz scent, Ogilvy Greece turned a bus stop in Athens into an interactive claw machine. The latter is the most maddening arcade game we can imagine. But hey, if it kills time waiting for the bus, we’re in. Just scan the QR code and try your hand for the chance to score a sample from a side panel! Hold it under your nose when the bus finally arrives—it’s like smelling the salts or herbs inside a plague-doctor mask. It’s summer, after all. Bodies are funky.

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