Real or Not Real?

A simple quiz, challenging marketers to tell real brand collaborations from AI fakes

Frontify is a brand management platform for creators and collaborators of brands, connecting everything (and everyone) important to the growth of your brand.

But what happens when the rulebook for brand guidelines gets ripped apart? AI is the conversation dominating the media cycle – with brands and creatives scrambling to adopt the new technology.

Surveying CMOs

With the rise of tools like ChatGPT, Midjourney and Bard, brands can become playthings for creators testing out these tools. AI makes it easy for social influencers to create their own AI generated brand collaborations. This creates the key question: what does it feel like for brands to know that a fast-rising proportion of ‘branded’ content has never been near the CMO?

We wanted to find out from CMOs themselves, so we surveyed 500 of them across the US & UK to find out their thoughts. Simply put: they are terrified.

72% of CMOs admit that AI-generated fake brand partnerships are their worst nightmare, whilst 9 in 10 CMOs agreed that due to the growing use of AI, protecting their brand has become even more important to their job role.

The Real or Not Real Quiz

Whilst those stats speak for themselves, we wanted to cut through the crowded AI conversation further. Working with the Frontify team, we created a 10-question quiz, testing our audience of marketers and brand leaders on whether or not they could tell real brand collaborations from the AI fakes. 10 images that were either Real or Not Real.

The results? 17,000+ attempts at the quiz, with an average score of just 6.36 out of 10 – showing that even established brand marketers struggle identifying real brand assets from those generated by AI.

And of course, those weren’t the only big numbers we hit. The quiz generated 40,000+ page views in just 21 days, with a 42% conversion rate  for unique pageviews. In total, the quiz accounted for 16% of US web traffic for Frontify in Q2 – at just 3% of the US marketing budget.

We also picked up media coverage across key marketing media including WARC, HelloPartner (formerly PerformanceIn), Marketing Beat, and Decision Marketing.

Want to test yourself? See if you can beat the CMOs and get a better score and take the quiz here.