To show tourists there’s more to Orlando than roller coasters and mouse ears, Visit Orlando and Razorfish cooked up a wildly ambitious idea: create 1,200 AI-generated characters—The Morelandos—based on thousands of Google reviews. Using Google’s Gemini, Imagen, and Veo tools, the team spun emotion-rich testimonials into hyper-local personalities tied to real attractions, like Splashton the otter at Rock Springs and Acoustica grooving to the acoustics at Steinmetz Hall. These characters now serve as city ambassadors both online and IRL, popping up in Google Maps, ads, and even augmented reality.
The creative workflow was anything but plug-and-play. Razorfish used Gemini to extract not just what visitors said, but how they felt—mining for sentiment, storytelling cues, and themes. Imagen then transformed these narrative seeds into visual characters with consistent style and depth, while Veo animated their stories through short scenes. It wasn’t about flashy prompts, but a seamless pipeline between tools, calibrated to ensure every character felt like a piece of the same imagined universe.
Beyond quirky mascots, The Morelandos are a toolkit for long-term storytelling. Each character acts as a bite-sized IP with room to evolve across campaigns, platforms—even merch. According to Razorfish’s CCO Anthony Yell, this wasn’t just a collection of AI tricks; it was a rethinking of how narratives are built and scaled. As generative tools mature, these connected workflows could become the new norm in brand storytelling.
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