How one advertising agency spoke truth with a deepfake

The campaign was the recipient of three D&AD Pencils, including a Yellow Pencil for use of micro-talent and influencers. Here, Publicis Mexico’s Chief Creative Officer Diego Wallach and Publicis Italy’s Global Executive Creative Director Andrey Tyukavkin, who created a deepfake of the murdered journalist, tell D&AD about using the technology in unexpected ways. 

As with many good ideas, Publicis’s powerful project began with an experiment. In 2019 Diego Wallach was already working with Propuesta Cívica on the #StillSpeakingUp campaign. Then at a conference he met Russian creative director and coder Andrey Tyukavkin, who was at Publicis Latvia. Tyukavkin had taken a rather novel approach to getting noticed within the agency by “deepfaking the most famous people in advertising to pretend that they were giving me a good recommendation.” These included designer Alex Bogusky, advertising executive David Droga, and Publicis’s own CEO Arthur Sadoun, all rendered on screen talking about Tyukavkin’s many creative merits. Wallach was impressed by the quality of these parodies, and the two got talking about the dangers faced by journalists in Mexico. Soon they had hatched an idea to digitally reconstruct Valdez. 

Wallach took the idea and quick prototype deepfake back to Mexico and showed it to Sara Mendiola, the director of Propuesta Cívica. He asked her if it was too sensitive. She however was impressed, and immediately relayed it on to Triana, to find out whether she was interested in authorising the project. “She calls me two days later,” Wallach explains, “and says Griselda has seen it and she’s really enthusiastic about doing it – we’re going to make it.” 

Deepfakes are not without controversy. Blending real footage with a type of artificial intelligence called deep learning (hence the name), they allow makers to create uncanny video and audio likenesses of real people. Often, they are discussed in the context of celebrity pornography or fake news, posing significant questions about ethical violations and disinformation. However, Tyukavkin thinks that this murky context worked in the #StillSpeakingUp campaign’s favour: “It’s not the technology. It’s how you use it, or misuse it.” Given the video’s message, they decided to christen this project a ‘deep truth’ instead — reflecting its use of a deepfake to speak openly, without fear of repercussion. 

“When something is overlooked, that’s where the creative grain lies,” Tyukavkin adds. “If there’s a technology that always does good, chances are your case will be bland because everyone is doing it. When it’s the other way round – when everyone is using deepfakes to fake and threaten, or intimidate and extort – then that might be the way to go if you find out how to use it properly.”

The power of Publicis’s deepfake comes not only in its accuracy, but in its words. The team placed authenticity at the heart of the project. “The main [copywriter] was Griselda, Javier’s widow,” Wallach explains. “She wrote the first script, and perhaps the only problem with that was that it was too long… So we started working with her, cutting it a little bit and creating a couple of more powerful quotes, but the main text was written by her.” They took pains too to get every detail right. When she pointed out that the voice wasn’t working, they remade it. “He had this characteristic Northern accent, and we had to give his voice back to him,” Wallach says. This involved recording three different actors from the region and blending them together to create something more believable.  

Authenticity also took time. “When you want to deepfake the President of the United States, you have years of footage,” Tyukavkin says. But for someone who didn’t regularly appear on camera, it’s much harder. After painstakingly sourcing footage and merging together different forms of open-source software to create the right algorithm, there was also the emotional toll to navigate. “It became very heavy at some point,” he adds. “I realised that I was looking at this face day and night, and it was the face of a man who is not with us anymore. It was at very hard, especially when you’re looking for perfection and it’s a machine that sort of remembers a face [and is] trying to guess it from the footage, then it gets it wrong.”

The pandemic presented logistical difficulties for the project. As Tyukavkin observes dryly, “We did make it totally in house – and by in house I mean… we were working from home” – with the time zones between Mexico and Latvia meaning many late nights and early rises for the pair as they relayed material back and forth. When it was finished, a decision was made to hold off on releasing the video. “We were going to launch for Javier’s anniversary, but it was the pandemic… We felt it wasn’t the right time to bring a dead guy back in the middle of lots of people dying,” Wallach says. And the longer they left it, the more it felt like it might never come out. “Of course when you think it over so much you start finding a lot of reasons to not launch it.” In this case those reasons involved a serious risk assessment for the Mexico office about whether this was too dangerous to put out. “We decided finally that we were not publishing any news, or names of possible criminals,” he adds. “[We were] more addressing the government… so it was a little safer.” 

Eventually it was released in October 2020 on the Mexican Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead). The video had an instant response, garnering 349m organic impressions and news headlines around the world. “Mexican society is so used to living among the dead that sometimes it becomes the norm,” Wallach explains. They’d wanted to shake what he calls that “complacency” – but they hadn’t been expecting the rest of the world to pay attention. As well as highlighting the extraordinary dangers faced by Mexican journalists, the deepfake had another unexpected consequence. It helped to secure justice for Javier Valdez. Several days after the campaign was launched Wallach received a message from Sara Mendiola at Propuesta Cívica, saying that it had unlocked various processes in Valdez’s case. “Actually, maybe one week before the D&AD awards this year, some of the killers of Javier were condemned to more than 30 years in prison,” Wallach says gratefully. “Everything came together.”