From Zero to 1,000 Creatives: How Salomon Did It in Record Time

Salomon is no stranger to bold terrain. As a brand known for pushing boundaries in performance footwear, they were looking to branch into new territory within fashion and culture. With new audiences across different geographies, traditional production simply couldn’t scale fast enough. They needed a content engine that could keep up — and cut through.

Salomon’s marketing team needed to:

• Create high-quality visuals at speed and scale
  
• Localize content for distinct audience segments (e.g. fashion, athletic, subculture)
• Whilst maintaining a consistent brand look and feel
• Reduce dependency on costly and time-intensive photo and video shoots
• Deliver fresh, premium assets across every major ad format and ratio for Paid and organic social channels.

Over an 8-week pilot, Pencil's creative team collaborated with Salomon to reimagine their content pipeline using GenAI — turning creative bottlenecks into scalable sprints.

Here’s what we did:

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• Global Campaigns, Local Flavor:
  Pencil generated insights across three core consumer personas and 6 key markets— Technical Fashion (ages 20–35), Technical Athletic (14–25), and Technical Subculture (16–30). Each insight was fine-tuned to suit the cultural aesthetic and style sensibilities of its audience in a specific location. Each audience received rich, localized generated insights and scenarios: from relaxed park hangs in Amsterdam to graffiti-filled alleys in Kreuzberg.

• Visual Generation at Speed: Pencil generated over 1,600 AI-powered visuals across these insights. Prompts incorporated mood, lighting, lens specs, wardrobe details —  to ensure each asset looked like it came straight from a high-end campaign shoot. From street-style campaign imagery in Paris to cinematic motion shots in Milan’s art districts.

• Template & Format Scaling:
  Pencil built 13+ modular templates for static and video content, then scaled them across Ad format ratios (1:1, 4:5, 16:9, 9:16) and for media placements on Meta, YouTube & YouTube Shorts, CRM and ECOM. Each asset optimised for each channel.
  
  
• AI Translations:
  Every image had its story. Pencil test models created copy to match the brand tone and audience persona — from “Everlasting Icon” to “Urban Beauty Explorerr”  the headlines were translated into 6 different languages with ease— giving each SKU its own identity across markets.