- IDOCIA
This Christmas… Universes Come to Life: Generative AI and Toy Advertising.
- By felipe san juan
Christmas, emotion, and the battle for attention.
Christmas is the great stage for the toy industry. During these weeks, brands compete to capture the attention of families saturated with stimuli and to connect emotionally with children who grow up surrounded by screens, imagination, and ever-increasing expectations. In this context, differentiation and purpose are essential.
But something profound is changing. Generative AI is redefining how campaigns are conceived, developed, and produced. From creative exploration to visual storytelling, possibilities are multiplying and processes are becoming more agile. At Oysters AI, we are experiencing this transformation firsthand through our collaboration with brands like VTech, which embrace innovation as a driver of educational communication.
The challenge of toy marketing today.
The toy industry faces unique challenges:
Highly concentrated purchasing cycles, with Christmas as the main focal point.
A dual audience: the message must inspire children while convincing parents.
Educational value increasingly demanded by families.
Competition from digital entertainment (apps, video games, on-demand content).
Stricter advertising regulations.
Brands need agile, versatile, highly visual campaigns with a clear sense of purpose. This is where generative AI opens up a new horizon.
What does generative AI really bring to toy marketing?
AI does not replace human creativity; it amplifies it. In a sector so closely tied to imagination, its impact is especially powerful.
- Unlimited creative exploration:
Concepts, visual universes, characters, narrative tones, art directions, settings… What once took weeks can now be explored in hours, accelerating the search for ideas with strong emotional potential. - Immediate previsualization:
Boards, high-fidelity visuals, mockups… enable faster decision-making and smoother collaboration with clients. This reduces uncertainty, aligns expectations, and encourages brands to commit to more ambitious ideas. - Personalization at scale:
Assets adapted by family segments, ages, countries, or formats, generated in minutes. The right message for the right audience. - More efficient and controlled production:
Animations, product demos, narrative universes, and brand worlds can be produced with greater freedom and at lower cost. - Enhanced storytelling:
Magical universes, believable characters, evocative atmospheres… AI strengthens the relationship between storytelling and learning, elevating the emotional value of the toy.
Oysters x VTech: journey and examples.
Our collaboration with VTech has allowed us to see firsthand how generative AI can elevate communication in the toy industry when applied with sensitivity, purpose, and creative rigor. Across several projects, we have built universes, narratives, and visuals that help families understand not only a product’s features, but also its emotional and educational value.
> StoriKid Pocket: when stories come to life:
StoriKid Pocket is a device designed to foster imagination and family bonding through oral storytelling. Our work focused on visually expanding that universe so that parents, and especially children, could fully imagine what the device offers. We designed scenarios inspired by the stories narrated by StoriKid and integrated its friendly rabbit character, all without the need for photo shoots or physical production:
the forest of Little Red Riding Hood,
a Halloween night,
the gingerbread house from Gingerbread Man,
or a Jurassic landscape filled with friendly dinosaurs…
These universes made it possible, for the first time, to provide the device with a rich, coherent, and magical emotional iconography, entirely without physical production. The result is communication that reinforces the educational value of storytelling as an emotional bridge between parents and children.
> Tut Tut Bólidos, expansive worlds that fuel imagination:
For Tut Tut Bólidos, we developed visuals that amplify the playful and exploratory spirit of the line. We created multiple scenarios where the vehicles came to life: beaches, deserts, workshops, snowy cities, and futuristic worlds. One of the protagonists is Goofy, an animated tugboat that lives adventures in each environment. AI allowed us to give him a coherent, versatile, and highly expressive cartoon aesthetic.
In addition, we produced animated videos that extended the toy’s universe and offered short stories designed to stimulate children’s imagination. Beyond entertainment, these pieces help parents visualize the potential of symbolic play and understand how the toy can support cognitive and emotional development.
KidiZoom Smart Watch, educational technology through visual storytelling:
The KidiZoom Smart Watch is a device designed to help children experience technology in a safe, creative, and autonomous way. Our work focused on translating all of its functionalities into a visual language that is clear, engaging, and educational.
Through generative AI, we recreated a video showcasing its dual camera for photos, selfies, and videos; creative effects, filters, and frames; augmented reality games; mazes, archaeology, and space travel activities; the voice clock function for learning to tell time in both digital and analog formats; and the customization of watch faces, backgrounds, and styles, among many other features.
Thanks to AI, each scene could be represented with narrative precision, a coherent aesthetic, and a strong focus on early learning. In doing so, we conveyed an essential message:
KidiZoom is not just a watch.., it is a tool for learning to manage routines, explore creativity, and foster autonomy.
Beyond features: bringing shared play back.
One of the key strengths of these campaigns is their ability to recover spaces for shared play. At a time when screens often tend to separate us, AI-generated universes show that technology can also bring people together: telling stories together, exploring new worlds, or living adventures with characters like Goofy helps strengthen family bonds and aligns VTech with its educational mission.
At Oysters AI, we believe in well-directed, sensitive, and human-centered AI. This is what we call Crafting AI, a way of creating visuals in an artisanal manner, with soul.
Would you like to explore how this technology can be applied to your brand? Write to me at:
felipe@oysters-studio.com
I’d be happy to connect!
Ah! And from all of us at Oysters AI, we wish you happy holidays! 
