Like most people with a social media account, you’ll likely have heard about the recent disaster that was supposed to be a live Willy’s Chocolate Experience event.
While the adverts promised an out-of-this-world experience inspired by the classic Dahl tale (and current blockbuster film), magic, whimsy and a ‘paradise of sweet treats’ had been replaced with wrinkled Temu backdrops, a clunky AI script and – according to one review – “a couple of jelly beans and half a cup of lemonade”.
Advertised using a too-good-to-be-true AI website and nonsensical posters, the signs were all there. But hindsight is a wonderful thing, and it soon turned out that hundreds of families were left £35 out of pocket, having spent a truly miserable time in what was, to all intents and purposes, a half-empty warehouse.
With pictures and videos of the half-hearted ‘experience’ soon uploaded to the internet, the whole debacle went viral almost immediately.
While it’s a valuable lesson for the general public, it also serves as a warning shot to the marketing world – while generative AI has huge potential for brands, there are a number of ethical and moral lessons which can be taken away from Willy’s ‘encherining’ (no, we don’t know either) experience.
Willy’s ChatGPT escapades
The brainchild of local entrepreneur Billy Coull, director of events firm ‘House of Illuminati’ (can it get any funnier?), Willy’s Chocolate Experience descended into farce almost immediately as indignant parents demanded refunds.
Confused and frustrated actors (who had only received gibberish-filled AI-generated scripts 24 hours earlier) soon abandoned the event and left for the pub – returning to find Coull on the verge of being attacked by an angry mob. Many of them have reportedly still not been paid.
With tensions rising, the police were soon called and the event closed down.
Essentially, it would appear that Coull, or his associates proceeded to whack a series of lazy Willy Wonka-themed prompts into a generative AI tool – quite literally crapping out an abomination of a website and some highly dubious posters.
As hilarious as the results might be, innocent families and employees have been left bereft of both time and money. According to The Guardian, some families arriving later in the day had travelled a significant distance to find there was no longer any event to speak of.
As a relatively new technology, generative AI can clearly still take people by surprise, duping plenty of families into parting with their hard-earned cash, without questioning the website’s unrealistic-looking visual mock-ups, or its confusing advertisements.
Not to mention of course the outrageous, AI-generated scripts handed out to the actors and featuring completely made-up characters such as the now-iconic ‘The Unknown’.
This viral disaster perfectly encapsulates the emerging dangers of using generative AI within the marketing industry.
the Willy Wonka experience just gets better and better
found a longer version of the Unknown clip
you can hear the kids being excited and happy, then the Unknown comes out and the mood just drops pic.twitter.com/KznMrDcLa3— Sunny Skunk 🇦🇺🍉 (Migration Hyperfixation) (@SunnySkunk) February 29, 2024
If, despite the clearly bodge-job nature of the website and its ads was enough to fool hundreds of people into attending a scam event – just how far can the average person be fooled by the technology?
Speaking to Marketing Beat, Pretty Green strategy partner Lucy Porter however points out that using AI mock-ups within the events industry really isn’t that out of the ordinary: “Events often rely on an artist’s impression sketch of the experience for pre-promotion and listings before the build is live, and AI can now produce exceptional visualisations.
“As AI imagery becomes more commonplace I expect we’ll see consumers becoming more savvy about AI vs. reality, but it’s important marketeers take a responsible and common-sense approach to managing people’s expectations.”
As Porter notes, we can only hope that the ill-fated experience will serve to better acquaint the paying public with the danger of AI mock-ups, and how they can very rarely act as a genuine representation of a service.
A cautionary tale in event planning
Drawing comparison to 2017’s disastrous Fyre Festival, Willy’s Chocolate Experience can be held up as a masterclass in how not to plan an event.
From the get go, suspicions were raised online about the many spelling mistakes and formatting errors visible across the website and its promotional materials (and yet people still bought tickets!), indicating a strong chance that it could be a scam.
According to attendee Stuart Sinclair – who had travelled over two hours with his children to the event – the shambolic nature of the experience was evident straight away: “There was maybe 20 chairs, a couple of tables and a half-inflated bouncy castle.”
Speaking to The New York Times, he added that despite the £35 tickets, each child was only given “two jelly beans” and “half a cup of lemonade”.
“The problems likely started with the initial planning and budgeting,” Porter explains.
“Outside of overhyped marketing which vastly overpromised in AI visuals, there were a number of challenges the organisers faced: the venue was too large to be effectively staged, there wasn’t enough budget for creative production, and let’s not forget the infamous ‘two jelly bean’ takeaway!”
Coull’s House of Illuminati was imply woefully underprepared – and as Porter points out, had wildly overdelivered on its AI-generated marketing content, promising customers something that was completely undeliverable for most smaller, independent even firms.
Porter adds: “From an outside perspective the uniting factor seems to be a lack of effective budgeting, which unfortunately led to a sweet event leaving a rather sour taste.”
In a bizarre attempt to rescue some credibility from the flames of the disaster, an official apology has been issued on the House of Illuminati Facebook page which, unsigned, appears to refute allegations that the event was a scam to generate money to pay for a wedding:
Although the experience would have proved stressful and upsetting for many of the parties involved, it is set to go down as an iconic pop-culture moment with a film about ‘The Unknown’ already said to be in production.
It should also undoubtedly act as a cautionary tale for anyone believing that a physical event could possibly be designed entirely by AI, with the harsh reality being that genuine hard work will still be required if you want to create something of genuine value for your customers.
