TV commercials
When one brand campaign ends, another one begins. 2025 marked the third iteration of the “Keep your options open” creative platform, and it looks a lot different than where we started. The new direction is largely due to a simplified strategy. The first two years required a broader concept to flex across 7+ different solution topics, while year 3 narrowed down to two: AI and hybrid cloud.
As the copy creative director of the campaign (and after exhaustedly wrangling words for 7+ topics for far too long), my goal was to find a way to simplify even further. With qualitative audience research and learnings from our 2024 AI ads, I knew it was possible—we just needed a strong enough idea to be both simple and flexible.
In partnership with the art creative director of the campaign, we concepted 4 ideas that narrowed our 2 topics into 1 core story—and did it with a commercial-first approach that led us to worlds no one in our industry (including ourselves) have gone.
Meet: AI, the human
Our audience testing and market research prove that the most unified challenge for our audience is the inability to control and customize how AI serves their business. AI is still surprisingly unhelpful; it’s way too general. That may work for us in our personal lives. But for an IT team responsible for implementing a technology that’s basically still in beta mode across an entire global company? That’s unfathomable levels of complicated—and expensive.
It’s also laughable—and that’s what we wanted to do: Make people laugh.
This concept personifies AI as a charmingly confident yet blissfully unreliable coworker to bring humor to the relatable moments AI fails through interactions between her and her manager. This sets up Red Hat to deliver a message that associates the brand with the AI solution that works with you and for you.
AI, the human | Red Hat 2025 brand campaign
From the moment we sold this idea to the first day of the shoot, we developed the characters—each script leading to a stronger understanding of their motivations, quirks, relationships, strengths, and weaknesses. We knew we wanted the AI to be likable; she’s ultimately created to make us genuinely laugh. And we knew that we wanted our audience to seem themselves in the manager; she had to be both emotionally and professionally intelligent.
With characters like these, it’s easy to write them to go anywhere. But for a brand like Red Hat, the scenarios we put them in needed to signal something that’s pretty specific to this tech audience. I used this as an opportunity to create a story framework that created alignment between specific challenges and the benefits we provide to address them. And then we set off.
After 1,000 iterations of storyboards and internal reviews later, we filmed 12 TV spots in 3 days in partnership with Summit Collective and Danny Corey. Each spot comes with bespoke paid copy for Facebook, Linkedin, YouTube, Washington Post, and other channels. These examples are available upon request.
TV spots here represent our Q2 2025 launch. The rest will be live in Q3 2025.