AI pupfluencer trains harder than a gym bro

The South African Guide-Dogs Association for the Blind (GDA) relies heavily on donations – which often come from older supporters and corporate funders. But younger donors, who have more disposable income, are harder to reach. Because people invest emotionally in a character more easily than a faceless charity page, GDA wanted to give the public a peek into the rigorous training that an assistance dog undergoes.

• Challenge

Real assistance dogs don’t have time to film content. They’re too busy transforming people’s lives. So, GDA partnered with VML to do the next best thing: create an AI pupfluencer based on a real dog. His name is Maxx Reps.

Building an AI dog was definitely not a shortcut. It takes two-to-three hours to build about 15 seconds of video – and that’s after a full storyboard has been developed.

The painstaking process involved:

crafting a character-appropriate script
recording a voiceover
designing a storyboard that aligns with that voice
generating and refining the AI dog’s performance frame by frame
syncing lip movements, gestures, and continuity
ensuring he looks like the same dog in every shot
editing the final video to match trending sounds and formats

It was important to get every detail exactly right to create a believable character.

• Inspiration

The team decided to meet younger potential donors where they spend a lot of their time already: following influencers on social media.

Maxx is inspired by an actual working guide dog named Solo – a parkrun-loving, fitness-obsessed, endlessly enthusiastic little power pup who stole hearts long before he became the inspiration for South Africa’s first guide-dog gym bro. Solo passed all his major assessments with flying colours because of his “locked-in” approach to task work.

Those characteristics became the ideal blueprint for Maxx, who is built to mimic the kind of gym-bro influencer we all know, except his workouts are grounded in the training that real assistance dogs do every day.

• Idea

Maxx may be entertaining, but all his content references something real – the gear assistance dogs need, the skills they practise, and the funding it takes to get them from puppyhood to graduation.

Maxx Reps has his own Instagram and TikTok, with content shared to YouTube and Facebook. This links to GDA’s social media accounts, with some posts shared across those accounts.

Alongside the content stream, Maxx has his own donation tracker: a public progress bar showing how close he is to “graduation”, with every rand raised going directly towards training real assistance dogs. The more people who feel inspired to donate towards Maxx, the more assistance dogs can be trained.

• Growth

This campaign is ongoing.

“He’s perfect to attract a new audience for us, using new technology like AI in a smart and very relevant way and, of course, the pure entertainment value… who wouldn’t love Maxx?”