It’s a moment a lot of us have probably had: someone gives you a gift, you open the box, realize it’s not at all what you wanted — but you smile anyway and say “thank you.” And then you think to yourself: “Well, that’s it — next time I’m definitely making a wishlist.”
I’ve been there too.
My name is Kristina, and I’m a PR manager at Ohmywishes. My job is to get as many people as possible to hear about us. And last summer, my team and I decided to try something we’d never done before — to step out of the online world and into the city.
That said, our goal wasn’t to make advertising for advertising’s sake — yet another “Download the Ohmywishes app, it’s great.” If anything, the opposite: we wanted to find a situation people would recognize themselves in before they even saw the logo.
And that’s how we arrived at the theme of bad gifts.
We Decided to Go Beyond Our Usual Channels
Until then, we’d only talked to our audience through digital: social media, the website, press, bloggers. But Ohmywishes isn’t just an app or a website. People use it in specific real-life moments: when they’re choosing a gift for a friend, getting ready for a birthday, or wanting to hint to their loved ones about what they’d like to receive.
So we wanted to get beyond the screen and tell people about ourselves where our users actually spend their everyday lives.
Everyone Knows What a Bad Gift Looks Like
We built it around the feeling that washes over you the instant you get something that’s completely not what you wanted. Someone hands you a bad gift, and your first reaction isn’t disappointment at all — it’s a frantic attempt to hide it. A smile, an “oh, how sweet,” and a couple of seconds to pull yourself together. It’s a feeling almost everyone seems to know.
And then, in those discussions, the campaign’s main slogan appeared — “Next Time, Wishlist First” — which captures exactly what’s running through your head in that moment.
Why We Chose AI Instead of a Photo Shoot
When it came to the visuals, it became clear we needed very specific emotions: that exact moment when someone has just opened the gift but is still trying to hide their disappointment.
We considered different options, but in the end we decided to work with AI generation. In large part because it let us cycle through options faster, tweak details, and search for the right mood in each shot.
But you definitely couldn’t call AI the easy way out. The level and the pipeline of the AI tools were on a completely different plane, and the team had to redo and refine the images many times over to land on a result that wouldn’t look like your typical AI-generated picture.
What We Got After Launch
At first we were thinking about a couple of standalone posters here and there, but a single poster is easy to lose among all the signs and ads. Put several of them side by side, though, and it becomes impossible to miss.
Pretty quickly, messages started coming in from friends, acquaintances, and our users. Some sent photos, some wrote to say they’d spotted the posters around the city, and plenty tagged us on social media. In digital, you usually see likes, clicks, reach, and other metrics. Here, you don’t know who exactly saw your work or when it happened. And then, out of nowhere, you get a message from someone who ran into it by chance on the street.
Expensive, Unpredictable, but Worth It
By now we understand that this project isn’t so much about outdoor advertising and AI as about the chance to engage with our users in a different way. Campaigns like this don’t guarantee results, and they’re harder to control. Posters can get pasted over with other ads, or city services might take them down, for instance. But that’s exactly what makes it an experiment.
For us, this campaign really resonates with the startup spirit — bold and mischievous in the best way, which is very much like Ohmywishes.
And it’s one thing to read a post from us in a channel — it’s another entirely to be walking your usual route to grab a coffee and suddenly stumble on the posters right there in the city.
In that moment, they stop being just an ad project and become part of ordinary life. That was probably the nicest bonus in the whole story. After something like this, you want to experiment again and dream up unusual projects worth spending even the biggest budgets on 🙂