An ESPN Commercial Hints at Advertising’s Deepfake Future
An ESPN
Commercial Hints at Advertising’s Deepfake Future
Unable to film new commercials
during the coronavirus pandemic, advertising agencies are turning to
technologies that can seamlessly alter old footage, sometimes putting viewers
in a position of doubting what they are seeing.
During
Sunday’s episodes of “The Last Dance,” the
ESPN documentary series about Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls,
State Farm ran a commercial featuring
expertly doctored footage of the longtime “SportsCenter” anchor Kenny Mayne.
In the
ad, a much younger Mr. Mayne is seated at the “SportsCenter” desk in 1998. He
reports on the Bulls’ sixth championship title — before taking a turn toward
the prophetic.
“This is
the kind of stuff that ESPN will eventually make a documentary about,” Mr.
Mayne says. “They’ll call it something like ‘The Last Dance.’ They’ll make it a
10-part series and release it in the year 2020. It’s going to be lit. You don’t
even know what that means yet.” As a vintage State Farm logo appears in the
background, he adds, “And this clip will be used to promote the documentary in
a State Farm commercial.”
The
producers made the commercial by layering video of Mr. Mayne’s 60-year-old
mouth onto footage of his 38-year-old face. To many viewers, the stunt provided
a welcome moment of levity in depressing times. Others were made uneasy by the
smoothness of the patch, describing it as a type of deepfake.
“We tried
to make the joke clear enough so that we weren’t tricking anyone,” said Carrie
Brzezinski-Hsu, the head of ESPN CreativeWorks, which created the commercial
with the ad agencies Optimum Sports and Translation.
Ms.
Brzezinski-Hsu said manipulated footage was likely to appear in future ESPN
ads. And executives at several major advertising agencies said they had
discussed making similar commercials with their clients in recent weeks.
“We’re so
restricted in how we can generate content,” said Kerry Hill, the production
director for the ad agency FCB in North America. “Anything that can be computer
generated is something we’re going to explore.”
Husani
Oakley, the chief technology officer of the ad firm Deutsch, said digitally
altered ads should somehow clue viewers into the fact that what they are seeing
is not completely real.
“The
technology is here, and it’s only going to get better and better, and we have
to get used to it,” he added. “We’re exploring ways to have fun with it.”
The ad
industry had started to show interest in digital manipulation before the
pandemic. In 2018, the ad agency Wieden & Kennedy London collaborated with
the artist Gillian Wearing on a deepfake film featuring
people whose facial features were blended with Ms. Wearing’s.
This
year, the ad firm Goodby Silverstein & Partners worked on an app that
allowed users to appear to be doing the dance moves pulled off by Lil Nas X in
a Doritos commercial. Executives described the experience as turning “deepfake
into dancefake.”
As
face-swapping and voice-generating technologies
have become more refined and accessible, people on video calls have superimposed Elon Musk’s face over
their own as they chat.
While the
blurring of the real and the fake can be amusing on Zoom or in the promotion of
snack foods, it presents thorny ethical issues around consent and
disinformation. Pornographic deepfake videos,
with real-seeming political figures and celebrities in central roles, have
circulated on Reddit. A recent doctored video appeared
to show Prime Minister Sophie Wilmès of Belgium linking the coronavirus
pandemic to climate change. Ahead of the 2020 vote, Facebook and Twitter have
said they are closely monitoring manipulated videos.
On
Monday, President Trump promoted a
digitally altered commercial promoting his candidacy on his Twitter account.
The video relied on doctored footage taken from an Allstate Insurance
commercial featuring the company’s pitchman, the actor Dennis
Haysbert.
In place
of Mr. Haysbert’s head, there is the head of former President Barack Obama. He
is seated in a living room with a group of men watching a TV commercial for
Joseph R. Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee. The
commercial-within-the-commercial uses audio from a 2017 event during which Mr.
Biden talked about having worked as a lifeguard at a swimming pool. “I loved
kids jumping on my lap,” the candidate says, as Mr. Obama’s companions shoot
him disapproving looks.
The
video, which has gotten more than 14 million views, ends with the Trump-Pence
logo. It does not include Mr. Trump offering a statement approving the commercial.
The Trump campaign and Allstate did not reply to requests for comment.
The
grafting of Mr. Obama’s head onto Mr. Haysbert’s body was too crude to fool
viewers, but as the ESPN-State Farm ad made clear, the tech is advanced enough
to make many people doubt what they are seeing.
Mr.
Oakley, the chief technology officer at Deutsch, said that social media
platforms might need to eventually develop algorithms to help viewers distinguish ads with real
humans from those that have been digitally altered.
“We won’t
be able to tell the difference,” he said. “We’ll have to rely on the machines
to tell us that the videos were made by machines.”
The post An ESPN Commercial Hints at
Advertising’s Deepfake Future appeared first on New York Times.
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