As Toys R Us continues to explore a successful future after the demise of its brick-and-mortar stores, it hopes that its new AI-generated videos will help capture the dreams and magic of its founders.
Toys R Us used OpenAI's text-to-video platform Sora to create an AI-generated video of a young Charles Lazarus, who founded the company in 1948, and his father in an old-fashioned bike shop. The minute-long video, released this week, cuts to a dream world filled with toys and the brand's mascot, Geoffrey the Giraffe. As Lazarus falls asleep, he is seen walking through the dream world as a narrator says, “Toys R Us was the dream of Charles Lazarus. May all your dreams come true, too.”
Toys”R”Us Global CMO Kim Miller Orko said the goal was to modernize the brand while also paying tribute to Lazarus, who was born a century ago and died in 2018. The AI video privately premiered at the Cannes Lions festival last week, but it's unclear if Toys”R”Us plans to use it for paid media. For now, the video is available on various online channels, including YouTube and Instagram. Financial details about the partnership with Sora were not disclosed.
“We're in what I call the 2.0 era, the era of 'same magic, new ways,'” Miller Orko, who also serves as president of Toys R Us Studios, told Digiday. “We want to share those childhood memories with kids now, the emotions and excitement that everyone has always felt for Toys R Us and for their millennial parents.”
The effort is part of a broader turnaround plan for Toys R Us, which filed for bankruptcy in 2018. After closing its stores, the brand was acquired in 2021 by private equity firm WHP Global, which also owns brands such as Express, Bonobos and Rag & Bone. It has since opened new flagship stores at the Mall of America in Minnesota and American Dream Mall in New Jersey. According to Toys R Us, the brand now generates more than $2 billion in retail sales annually through its 1,400 stores and e-commerce sites. (The new AI film also notes that Toys R Us has a presence in every Macy's store.)
This isn't Miller-Orko's first foray into new platforms: She was one of the first to try out Facebook Live, and helped organize a potluck dinner party for Snoop Dogg and Martha Stewart. Asked about the decision to use AI for the film, Miller-Orko said the team wanted to push the boundaries of technology in ways that a traditional studio wouldn't be able to, especially with a limited budget and no time machine. But she added that there's still room for human creativity, emotion and traditional storytelling.
“The visceral experience throughout still needs to connect, and it also needs to have a storytelling logic,” she said. “In some iterations, logically it was exactly what we said it would be, but when we played it out, it didn't apply to the human experience like it does in real life.”
The film was produced by creative agency Native Foreign, which got early access to Sora and invited Toys”R”Us to be its first brand. To create the film, the team created hundreds of AI-generated video shots in Sora, then narrowed it down to just a few dozen.
Native Foreign's chief creative officer, Nick Krebeloff, said the team wrote long prompts for Sora for each scene, describing the technology as “kind of like a new camera and post-production.” [production] To “put it all together,” we needed to tell Sora who is in each scene, what people and objects are doing, and when, where, and why something is happening. To connect the past and the present, we also needed to make the earlier scenes look like they were from the 1920s or 1930s, while the later scenes look more modern, so that kids today wouldn't be confused or disgusted by toys that are almost 100 years old.
“Like anything, if you go into something without any background knowledge of how things work, you might get a less than desirable, dare I say bland, result,” Kreberoff says, “but once you start sprinkling in some filmmaking jargon and really setting the scene and the mood, you start to get better results.”
This doesn't mean Toys”R”Us plans to use Sora for all of its video productions. Miller Olko said the company doesn't plan to use Sora to boost the amount of content it produces, but did note that the company's parent company, WHP Global, has embraced AI as one of its key initiatives. But it does see potential in using AI to create content for sister brand Babies R Us, which could help place babies, especially newborns, in different settings and with different products beyond a single photo shoot.
Sora, announced in February, is not yet available to the public, but OpenAI has been working with filmmakers to test the platform, most recently collaborating with the TriBeCa Film Festival. While Sora has garnered a lot of attention (good and bad), it's not the only AI video tool on the market. Others include Runway's newly released Gen-3 Alpha model, Stable Diffusion. It's also important to look at the full picture of AI tools across different types of content, noted Forrester analyst Rowan Curran, adding that AI video is still “very early days.”
“These tools are really good at creating certain kinds of visual content,” Curran said, “but it's still going to require a lot of human effort to make it commercially usable and brand-safe.”
Since its release, the video has received mixed reviews, with some citing its more “creepy” aspects and others pointing out inconsistencies in the AI-generated version of Lazarus. Others see it as an innovative and creative way to tell a story that wouldn't be possible without AI. Greg Swan, senior partner at FINN Partners, acknowledges the challenges Sora faced in creating a lifelike video and the inconsistencies in its visual style. But by taking a fictional approach, Toys”R”Us keeps viewers from falling into the uncanny valley by distancing them from reality, Swan said.
“The fact that the Toys R Us concept is rooted in a child's dream has allowed us to use its weakness as a strength: audiences expect ethereal experiences to be more fluid, more dream-like,” Swan said. “It's a clever move, and it's exactly why we were able to tell the story well despite the unnatural realism of our protagonist. If this had been a more realistic concept, it wouldn't have worked – at least with the tools we have available today.”
There are still many unresolved issues surrounding AI-generated content, including ethical standards, legal requirements, transparency of training data, and disclosure of AI. Swan said these are all mutual responsibilities of brands, tech companies, educators, and governments. (She also mentioned the importance of having humans involved in editing, ethics, and promotion.)
“The kids at Toys R Us don't need to grow up,” Swan says, “but as the AI industry matures, early examples like this one provide good fodder for all involved to test, practice, and learn from.”
