Meet Don Catto: How Polish eSky used AI characters to build brand trust

Inga Wawrzyniak-Gacek is the group marketing communication director at eSky - global online travel agency from Poland. She has 15+ years of experience in driving growth, brand transformation, and business performance across retail, digital, and technology-driven organisations.

Today’s traveller is no longer simply booking a destination; they are booking an experience: a concert, a culinary journey, or a cultural event. This shift toward experience-driven travel creates a scalability balancing act. Travellers expect broad choices, yet, they demand relevance and personalisation aligned with their individual travel style.

For travel platforms like ours at eSky, operating across multiple international markets, this means delivering highly tailored content at scale. Historically, delivering this at scale required massive investment and complex operations to create, localise, and adapt content for diverse markets.

Today, AI allows us to bridge this gap between scale and personalisation, shortening the path from inspiration to booking. At the same time, the industry faces a growing challenge: in an environment increasingly shaped by AI-generated content, ensuring authenticity and reliability has become more important than ever. Maintaining consumer trust is therefore paramount.

Our goal — and differentiator — was to leverage AI to create engaging, high-performing ads without compromising our brand’s authenticity, which is built on real travel experiences.

The workflow: Human + AI + data

Partnering with Growth Partner Salestube and creative agency Gong, we strategically embraced AI’s “artificiality” as a strategic asset. Our process centred on a workflow we call “Human + AI + data”.

The process presents one integrated workflow, extended across our teams and key partners. Salestube turns performance data and market trends into actionable insights. We define business objectives and success criteria, and Gong leads the AI-driven creative execution.

First, we analysed general search data to find gaining popularity, but not obvious holiday destinations, like Bari. Building on these insights, we looked for a creative vehicle to deliver the message.

Right now, one of the most prominent trends in video content, especially on social media, revolves around the use of cats and dogs, portrayed with playful, human-like traits. These visuals have a proven track record of going viral and naturally capturing audience attention.

That trend inspired us to feature talking cats in our video. It aligned with our broader objective: to apply a marketing approach that would have been nearly impossible to execute without AI, while simultaneously carving out a distinct brand voice.

As Alona Vigovska, Strategic Partnership Development Manager at Salestube, puts it: “We wanted to move beyond the limitations of standard creative and find something truly unique to eSky.”

Balancing AI whimsy with brand authenticity

We developed several creative concepts with one common thread: they blended Veo-generated AI elements and high-quality photography of our actual destinations, striking a deliberate balance between AI-driven creativity and brand authenticity.

For example, we brainstormed a video with a daydreaming office employee, swimming at the pool at her desk. The scene then cuts to show her real vacation.

Ultimately, however, the cats won the day.

“Using a talking animal creates an immediate, helpful abstraction,” said Michał Bucholc, creative director and AI lead at Gong “Because it’s clearly AI-generated, the audience understands they are engaging with a creative story, not a literal depiction of a hotel or beach.”

He continued: “This distinction allowed us to lean into AI-driven storytelling while ensuring our actual destination photography remained the ‘source of truth’ for the traveller.”

One of our ads featured a charismatic “Italian Godfather” cat in Bari, teaching the Italian alphabet through iconic associations like “D” for Dolce Vita.

Watch the video

Link to YouTube Video

Directing AI with programmatic precision

We structured our videos around key performance principles: a strong hook in the first 2-3 seconds, short 1-2 second shots, high-energy pacing, and edits synchronised to music with a clear beat-drop moment.

Effective video prompting is rooted in traditional production expertise — framing, cinematography, and post-production styling. AI is a powerful tool, but it does not replace the necessity of a structured script and a cohesive creative vision. A strong prompt acts the bridge between a great idea and a professional execution

Our prompting strategy focused on four key elements:

1. Pacing and editing style (quick cuts, motion transitions)
2. Premium travel mood (the quality and uniqueness of the material)
3. Cinematic camera language (mix of wide and close lifestyle shots, smooth movement)
4. Distinct colour grading with vibrant contrast and warm tones

“We broke the prompt down into a rigid architecture: subject, action, context, camera angle, visual style, and timing,” said Bucholc. “It wasn’t just about describing a cat; it was about directing a performance.”

The challenge was most acute in the Bari-inspired “Italian Godfather” sequence. To ensure the cat’s mouth movements felt intentional rather than random, the team had to script the prompt with surgical precision, specifying how the camera moved, and what occurred at each specific second of the clip.

Building a new storytelling standard

Our experience showed us that AI can be a powerful tool for building, not breaking, trust. By being transparent about its use and leaning into its creative strengths, we were able to connect with our audience in a new way.

In the YouTube campaign, two AI-generated videos accounted for nearly 70% of all clicks and Google Ads allocated 2-3X more budget to them, achieving a 3X greater reach than other videos. Production time was about 80% shorter, closing the entire project in under a month.

This campaign was never about letting AI run the show. Human judgment was crucial at every step: from shaping direction to ensuring every output delivered business and brand value.

The creative process was a generate-review-refine loop. We tweaked copy, tightened transitions, and ensured the final videos aligned with our brand. As a result, we recorded a 30% relative lift in “eSky” searches among people who saw the ad, according to a Google Brand Lift study.

By integrating AI into our creative workflow, we are moving beyond experimentation to establish a new standard for travel storytelling. Anchoring our strategy in BigQuery and GA4 insights, we leverage Veo, Gemini, and Imagen to rapidly transform data-driven trends into high-quality video. Moving forward, this synergy will be our benchmark for elevating the eSky brand while staying true to our core travel experiences.