Qualcomm had an obvious route for its Snapdragon holiday campaign: demonstrate what a laptop could do with AI, battery life and enough computing power to help a child win a kart race. The team explored that idea, complete with a professional driver coaching the young racer. Then it set the idea aside.
AJ Joseph, Qualcomm’s vice president and head of creative, says the alternative, a family building a cardboard time machine, gave the product something the more literal racing concept could not: an emotional reason for viewers to care. In written answers shared with ContentGrip by the campaign team, he describes what was rejected, what research changed, where AI actually entered production and how the finished film was adapted across screens.
Table of contents
- How the holiday story took shape
- Why the team made the film simpler
- Where AI helped make the work
- What changed across markets and channels
- What marketers can take from it
How the holiday story took shape
The Snapdragon holiday film follows a family’s effort to build a time machine, using a Snapdragon-powered laptop and AI to turn a child’s fantasy into a shared project. The campaign ran across broadcast, connected television and paid social in the United States and several European markets.
Behind that finished story was a very different proposal. The team considered two children competing at a kart track. One kept losing until a Snapdragon laptop, a professional driver’s coaching and some computational problem-solving helped make the kart faster. It would have dramatized performance benefits, but AJ says the concept lacked something important.
“The time machine had something the others didn’t: the magic and wonder of being a kid at the holidays,” AJ says.
That decision makes the technology a supporting character. The family’s sense of possibility, rather than a product specification, supplies the stakes. It is also what makes the film readable to viewers who are not comparing processor performance.
Why the team made the film simpler
The team’s audience research changed the script after it had already settled on its main idea. AJ says early respondents reviewed storyboards for much longer than an ordinary viewer would spend with a 30-second advertisement. The research suggested that even an appealing story could lose people if too many things happened too quickly.
“We’d been cramming too much in,” he says. The team cut unclear elements, moved scenes and reduced rapid edits to reduce cognitive load and make the story easier to follow. The goal was to keep the family at the center while giving the audience enough information to understand how the laptop helped.
This was a practical trade-off, not an argument against showing the technology. The film still needed to support Snapdragon’s existing “That’s how” brand positioning. But every technical demonstration competed with screen time needed to establish the characters, their goal and the payoff.
For marketers working with complex products, the lesson is in the sequencing: show enough of the product to make its role credible, then let a comprehensible human outcome carry the story. An elaborate capability demonstration can work on a storyboard and still overload a short video.
Where AI helped make the work
AI appears in the film as part of the fictional family’s creative process. It also had a separate, real production role.
AJ says the team used AI in development for previsualization and concept exploration. Early visualizations gave people something specific to react to before committing to a direction, making it easier to abandon an idea that was not working. AI also contributed to some of the 3D renderings and onscreen results.
The distinction matters because a campaign about AI can easily make the production method the headline. Here, the team’s description suggests a more useful workflow: use quick concept visuals to sharpen human creative choices, then decide which assets support the story.
“The ideas, the taste, the emotional calls all come from people,” AJ says. That is the creative principle he describes, not a measured claim that AI improves every production process.
What changed across markets and channels
The hero idea remained consistent, while the executions changed considerably by territory and screen. In France and Germany, the film was fully localized, including spoken dialogue, on-screen text, user-interface elements and voiceover. Social feeds received vertical cuts of 15 and six seconds.
Even the end cards were specific to where the ad appeared. AJ points to a Best Buy promotion for an HP OmniBook 3 in a placement during Notre Dame versus Miami. Rather than assume one call to action suited every placement, the team adapted the commercial signpost while retaining the same family narrative.
The evaluation plan also combined different signals. AJ says the team will use brand-lift studies across channels, alongside reach, video-completion rates and social conversions. Those measures capture different questions: whether audiences saw the campaign, watched its story, changed their brand perceptions or took a more immediate action.
That mix offers a more realistic test than treating a short-form clip and a broadcast film as if they ought to produce the same response.
What marketers can take from it
Three choices make the Snapdragon production particularly instructive. First, the team rejected a concrete product-led story in favor of a more emotionally accessible one. Second, it used qualitative testing to remove cognitive load rather than add every product benefit to the script. Third, it preserved the idea while adapting language, format and commercial calls to action for different contexts.
The work also shows why creative AI needs careful attribution. The interview describes specific uses in previsualization and rendering, while keeping the judgments about pacing, emotion and storytelling with the creative team. That distinction is more informative than a broad assertion that the advertisement was either “AI-made” or entirely untouched by AI.
Outside work, AJ’s enduring interest is dirt biking. He has ridden across the western United States, Baja and Morocco, and enjoys the mechanical work of keeping a bike running. Most of all, he says, riding lets him explore places a car cannot reach and spend time fully unplugged.
