How We Made a Talking Baby Ad Go Viral!

Baby 1: Do you remember a few years ago when we didn't have all these AI creative strategists?

Baby 2: I, I wasn't even born yet.

Baby 1: Neither were you.

Travis: And it got over 12,000 in spend on Meta with a 5.41% click-through rate. It's been our top performing ad for a couple weeks. Let me show you exactly how we made it, and then I'll break down when you should actually use AI ads like this one.

Travis: Step one is to upload a photo of yourself into ChatGPT 4o or 5, the image gen, to turn yourself into a baby. You're just gonna type in the prompt, "Make this person into a baby sitting wearing headphones in a podcast studio." And boom, AI baby version of you is ready to go.

Travis: Now, make a second baby by typing in, "Make this other person into a baby in the exact same podcast studio, but from a different angle." Then you're gonna download both images, and it's time to move on to your script.

Travis: Step two is really gonna be to write out the dialogue that you want your babies to say in this ad. Here's a part of our actual script that we came up with. You can see that our approach was to use silly Gen Z slang like "bussin'" or "that slaps" or "this straight fire."

Travis: Our approach was we want to make this even funnier than just two babies doing a podcast. Go over the top and make it even sillier and more ridiculous, and you'll probably end up more successful. We kept each line short, five to ten words max, and that was gonna help to make the animation smoother and easier to generate.

Travis: We learned the hard way that if you try to input a super long script, it's gonna get all messed up. So just write it out, and then make sure you separate the lines that you want baby one to say from the lines from baby two to say into two separate documents, and you can upload them and create them separately.

Travis: Step three is to create the audio from the script that you just wrote. So while we could have recorded the audio ourselves, we decided to use ElevenLabs' text-to-speech tool. It's super easy to use, and we just typed in the lines for baby one, generate, and give that a listen to make sure it sounds good.

Travis: And then do the same for baby number two. Export each baby's audio as separate files that we're gonna throw into our video editor a little bit later.

Travis: Also, you want to get audio of baby one reading some voiceover that I'll be playing with some B-roll footage that you're gonna do and cut to after the podcasting part of your ad is over. It's great to have the same voice for consistency of one of your, your babies that's talking. That's what we did, and we think it made it more successful.

Travis: Step four is to get your talking babies made inside of this tool. We used Hedra, or Heedra. There are a few tools that do this, but we went with Heedra because it's ten dollars a month and it includes a realistic body movement, which is what we were looking for.

Travis: So we're gonna upload the first baby image, add the audio file that we got from ElevenLabs for baby one, and hit generate. This part takes 30 to 60 seconds, but you're gonna look at that. Mouth movements, head tilts, subtle body language. For social media ads, this is totally gonna work.

Travis: Now do the exact same thing that you did with baby one for baby two. Download both videos in the highest quality that you can.

Travis: And then we're onto our last step. You're going to chop up these Heedra files that you downloaded into a video editor. You can use CapCut, we used VEED for this one, and we'll cut between them back and forth like a real podcast conversation.

Travis: Where you have baby one speaking, then cut to baby two, and then back and forth a couple times. Now you're just gonna add those essential elements like captions, a title card. We added a little disclaimer. We put in some B-roll and screen recordings of our actual product, and this grounds it and shows that we're actually selling something at the end here. Then you export it.

Travis: Total creation time took about 45 minutes once you understand the process. Now let's talk about when to use ads like this. The performance marketing expert Alex Cooper, a good friend of Motion, said it best in my opinion. He wrote, "People are way more forgiving of AI when it's fun." It's just helping our audience have a little bit of fun.

Travis: And that's it. That's our whole strategy with this. Because right now, if you try to pass AI video ads as real, you're just going to erode trust.

Travis: So our approach is to make it ridiculous, make it entertaining. Talking babies, talking animals. I also like what Alex said where he tries to come up with visceral ideas that make the invisible visible with AI, which is perfect for testing in your ads.

Travis: So he notes most problems are invisible: stress, confusion, data overload. AI lets you visualize them in exaggerated ways that can become really effective in your ads.

Travis: That's our tip. If you want to check out Motion, click the link in the description so you can analyze your crazy AI ads like we do and like the best of the best do.