Pit Viper
Redefining performance with AI & a face-meltingly creative campaign
( Services )
- AI Transformation
- Brand & Media
Pit Viper may be based in Salt Lake City, but the eyewear brand is a full-time resident of Party Mountain…
Where the fun is relentless, the outrageous is real, and the gear is built for a good time and a long time.
Despite the brand having a loyal fan base, sales were declining and it was clear we needed to attract the next generation of Pit Viper fans to boost revenue. Yet the brand lacked upper funnel, awareness-driving creative.
To ignite a hunger for their brand’s unique blend of style and performance among their young audience, DEPT® helped Pit Viper leverage AI to deliver a face-melting campaign that authentically captured the mindset of Party Mountain and introduced newcomers to the brand, as part of the Google AI Lighthouse program.
Faster than a speeding bullet
For this project, our biggest hurdle was its incredibly tight timeline: Pit Viper’s campaign was set to launch in just four weeks.
To hit such an ambitious deadline, AI offered a massive advantage in its ability to accelerate the campaign’s delivery.
However, we also knew that “regular” AI wouldn’t work for a brand that’s anything but regular. Because Pit Viper doesn’t just make sunglasses; they make sunglasses that sunglasses would wear if sunglasses could wear sunglasses.
To successfully deliver an authentic representation of Pit Viper’s unique brand of humor, we needed to leverage AI in a way that raised the bar for creativity—which was where Google’s AI Lighthouse and its challenge to make the “impossible ad possible” came into play as the perfect program to drive our mission.
Grabbing AI by the horns
We kick-started the production process in less than a week. Our first task was to create a concept and script for the campaign, which needed to feature the product’s performance outside its original realm of extreme sports.
With no time to waste, we used Google Gemini to generate proofs of concept, which gave us a fuller picture of what didn’t work, what might work, and what definitely worked.
From there, we iterated quickly and honed in on the most on-brand ideas by challenging Gemini to get down and dirty with Pit Viper’s unique brand of wild and weird. While it wasn’t the final creative route selected, our personal favorite was Meat Man—yup, you’re reading that right—a daredevil snowboarder made of meat and rocking a pair of Pit Vipers.
These wacky ideas came together with our final concept for the campaign, “Redefine Performance,” in which our windbreaker-clad protagonist conquers his adversary—low performance—and showcases the versatility of his Pit Vipers in the process.
To bring “Redefine Performance” to life, we turned our ideas into videos using Google Lab’s Veo 2. This platform enabled us to create scenes that we methodically improved by structuring our prompts to include all the minutiae of a real-life production shoot: Lighting, camera angles, set details, mood, subject, and more.
So, how quickly did we manage to pull things together? For comparison, a typical IRL campaign shoot takes days, especially involving multiple scenes. In Pit Viper’s case, however, we were able to complete production in a matter of hours.
In the end, our team crunched the numbers and estimated that—by minimizing traditional set design, shooting, and post-production needs with the help of AI—we were able to achieve a 400% decrease in our timeline.
Blast off
Our AI-powered approach didn’t just meet the deadline; it shattered expectations. Launched just before the Super Bowl, the campaign achieved a 3.8% lift in ad recall in only 4 days, validating the creative’s immediate impact and unlocking a 69% budget increase due to strong initial performance.
-
92%
VCR on Meta
-
6.5%
Ad recall lift
-
19%
Increase in sessions
For distribution, we relied on YouTube’s AI-assisted campaign solutions
These allowed us to “blast the ad where it would be watched, not just seen,” optimizing for awareness and reducing time spent on audience design by 60%, ensuring our bold creative reached the right eyeballs efficiently.
As a result, we saw a 6.5% ad recall lift among the core 18- to 24-year-old demographic and, overall, the campaign reached 10.3 million viewers within four weeks at an efficient $2.94 CPM. But most impressive was the 92% VCR on Meta.
Beyond awareness, the work drove tangible business interest, contributing to a 19% increase in Google Analytics sessions post-launch.
““A 92% view completion rate is, I think, the highest that
we’ve ever seen on a 30-second ad”
”Natalie Kunstadter, VP Creative at DEPT®
