Campaign Trail: Equinox uses AI to contrast fitness with digital fakery

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Equinox has long used the New Year as an occasion to roll out provocative and irreverent campaigns that turn fitness, resolutions and culture on its head. Its latest effort, “Question Everything But Yourself,” continues that rebellious streak by tackling an age of unreality that is being exacerbated by the meteoric rise of artificial intelligence.

The campaign’s 30-second hero spot is an adrenaline rush of computer-generated oddities, including a woman biting into a dog to reveal gooey cake, two U.S. presidents arm wrestling, “Mona Lisa” kissing “Girl with a Pearl Earring,” and a bunch of surfing popes and animals, among other things, diving into pools, attacking people and wearing rollerskates.

Similarly, a series of creative assets juxtapose dispatches from the uncanny valley — a bikini babe with three breasts, an overpumped muscle man, a baby dictator, and others next to gritty photos of toned — and real — fitness models. “Question Everything But Yourself” will run across digital and social platforms, print, out-of-home and streaming channels.

The campaign was created with agency Angry Gods after a multi-agency search. Equinox sought an agency that could help them create buzz and value while reinforcing a brand identity that maintains fitness as a luxury.

Angry Gods’ initial idea for the pitch was “Feel Everything,” a campaign that positioned working out as a way to break through cultural numbness. However, upon further reflection, the idea felt expected and unlikely to win the search. 

“In a pitch, you’re not actually trying to solve the problem,” explained Angry Gods founder and CEO Krish Menon. “If you try and solve the problem in the pitch, you’ll end up potentially creating something that’s safe, but if you try and put something in the pitch that they will look at and go ‘that’s interesting,’ you can then work with them to refine it over time.” 

To solve for the pitch instead of the problem, Angry Gods Executive Creative Director Gabe Miller came up with the idea at the core of “Question Everything But Yourself”: in the world of fake news, viral stunts and AI-generated slop, consumers can no longer believe their eyes. The new status quo served as a perfect juxtaposition for the ability to come alive at Equinox.

“You need to question the world and be suspicious of everything in order to function, but you shouldn’t lose sight of the things you can trust and can believe in, which is yourself and your own body, goals and spirit,” Miller said.

AI tackles AI

Unlike competitor brands, Equinox does not market fitness as a product, instead working to stand for values like effort, discipline and intensity. But in a world where treatments like Botox and GLP-1s help people change their appearance without effort in the gym, the brand had an opportunity to use “shallow imagery to tell a very deep truth,” Menon said.

“This campaign became about contrast, not moralizing, not scolding — just holding two truths right next to each other and letting people feel the difference,” the executive said. “The idea wasn’t to say, ‘AI is bad’ — because that’s the way some people would look at it — it was actually to say some things can’t be short cut.”

Indeed, the campaign is not a pure critique of AI, the technology that was used to create half of the imagery and nearly all of the video assets. In that way, the campaign acknowledges the reality that AI imagery isn’t just emerging, it’s already normalized. Recent campaigns from Dollar Shave Club and Almond Breeze have toyed with this tension, but perhaps not as succinctly. 

“The goal from the very beginning was to reflect what’s out there. It was not about us creating new things. It was about us holding a mirror up… In an ideal world, our ads should just be like what your feed already is,” Miller said of the campaign creative.

To reflect consumer feeds, Angry Gods worked to be as current as possible; the use of AI throughout the process sped up its ability to deliver against tight deadlines. Images like a version of the 2023 meme featuring Pope Francis in a Balenciaga puffer jacket made the cut, while deadlines left others, like Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in a Nike sweatsuit, unrealized. The agency also passed on a reference to Nigerian prince scams that could have been misconstrued by consumers.

“Our goal was to make something that didn’t feel mean, gratuitous or distracting without insight,” said Menon.

Is an image of a woman with three breasts not gratuitous? 

“You know that the three-boobed woman doesn’t exist. Yet, the biggest account of that has 3.6 million followers on Instagram,” Menon explained. “Why do 3.6 million people follow something that doesn’t exist? What’s the point behind it? You’re fascinated and you’re disgusted, but you can’t look away. And there’s something interesting about that.”

While the campaign has faced some online backlash because of its use of generative AI, the agency made clear that the technology was only used because it was core to the concept. Angry Gods makes the decision about whether or not to leverage AI in creative work on a case-by-case basis, but remains pro-AI in regard to process.

“A lot of our strategy work and grunt work at the mid-level is done by custom AI that we’ve developed in-house,” Menon said. “From a creative standpoint, it is 100% on a case by case basis. But where we 100% use AI now is in mocking up and conveying ideas. It is so much easier to build storyboards and concepts for pitches now with AI than ever before, so we are using AI to convey and sell ideas more than we’ve ever done before.”