Behind the Work: How VaynerMedia Applied Creator Principles to AI for Grab
People don't want brand lectures. They want content that speaks like a friend, lands the joke, and shows up in the moment. That's hard to do across multiple markets without blowing up budgets.
Grab and VaynerMedia built CreAItors to solve this. One brief turned into 16,000 unique pieces across six Southeast Asian markets to spark adoption of Grab's Group Order feature - fast, relevant, and without old-school production drag.
The core problem
Group ordering is messy. Taste, budget, diet, spice tolerance - infinite combinations inside one chat. As Tim Lindley, APAC MD at VaynerMedia, put it, you can't talk to a generic crowd. You have to speak to the Keto King, the Lactose Dodger, and the Level 10 Spice Champion - each on their terms, at scale.
The idea: a human-led AI system built for relevance
CreAItors blends generative models with data, platform signals, and human direction to produce hyper-specific characters, moments, and narratives. Five creative levers drive the system: location, occasion, cast, AI persona, and platform format.
As Tim said, the breakthrough wasn't text or video generation; it was the "democratisation of high-end production." What used to take complex 3D pipelines now takes minutes - without the old costs or timelines.
Inside the "Content Kitchen" workflow
- Models used at launch: Gemini for trend analysis, OpenAI for character development and scripting, and Kling.AI for video generation.
- Platform-agnostic by design: the stack can swap as better tools emerge.
- Outcome: high-fidelity characters and distinct worlds with rapid iteration speeds.
Why this reshapes agency craft
- Make for the feed, not the boardroom. Design for relevance, volume, and speed.
- Blend creative, strategy, production, and media into one operating unit.
- Human + AI teams: creatives edit and direct daily output; strategists turn data into immediate action; technologists fine-tune models and automate workflows.
How human direction steers the machines
The team treated CreAItors like creators. They wrote character bibles - tone, taste, personality, and "beat" - then trained the system to speak with consistency. In Tim's words: the human team provides the soul; the AI provides the body. Humans own the message and strategy; AI handles execution at scale.
Getting nuance right across Southeast Asia
- Human firewall: local teams defined social archetypes before a single prompt was written.
- Language as a variable: tonality, formality, and slang differ by market - and by cohort.
- Back-translation checks using different models ensure the intended tone survives each step.
- In-market creatives approve final outputs to avoid generic tropes and keep characters true.
Results that matter
Grab reported strong gains in media efficiency, CTR, and conversion - along with a significant lift in Group Orders attributable to the campaign.
What's next for CreAItors
This isn't a one-off. With codified workflows and character profiles, the brand now has the early shape of an owned IP library and an execution model it can re-run on demand. New briefs can reactivate existing characters, deepen their lore, or introduce new avatars as behaviors shift.
The stack keeps upgrading as models improve. The quality achieved here is the floor, not the ceiling. The bigger conversation now: operationalising AI across multiple workstreams to drive efficiency and relevance across the business.
How creatives can run this play
- Define your levers: location, occasion, cast, persona, format. Lock them in before you generate.
- Map cohorts and write character bibles: voice, beliefs, humor, and boundaries.
- Build modular prompts and templates: one brief in, many variants out.
- Set up local QA: back-translation + cultural checks to keep nuance intact.
- Be platform-native: make more, ship faster, let performance signals guide the next batch.
- Measure what matters: CTR, conversion, and the action you actually want (like Group Orders).
Tools referenced
- OpenAI for character development and scripting
- Grab for the Group Order feature the campaign supported
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