BODYARMOR AND POWERADE
This past summer I had the opportunity to intern with BODYARMOR and Powerade in Queens, NY. Over the course of the internship, I learned from an incredibly talented group of people while building both personal and professional connections with my coworkers and fellow interns. My work ranged from designing POS (point of sale) advertisements that will be used in the real world, to creating an original ad concept for Powerade’s fall football campaign.
The highlight of my experience was my intern capstone project, where I explored the present and future role of AI in creative production. For this project, I researched workflows, tested tools, and ultimately produced a BODYARMOR commercial that was almost entirely AI-generated. This project not only pushed my design and technical skills, but also gave me valuable insight into how AI can streamline content creation while raising important questions about its limitations. Overall, this internship gave me hands-on industry experience, creative growth, and an even stronger passion for working at the intersection of design, technology, and brand storytelling.
Internship Work
Powerade fall football ad.
During my internship, much of my day-to-day work focused on reformatting and resizing existing BODYARMOR and Powerade creative into POS (point of sale) ads. These ranged from window clings and cooler clings to end caps and other in-store displays, where I adapted designs to fit the exact dimensions and requirements of each format. While this was often “cookie cutter” work, it gave me valuable experience in brand consistency, production accuracy, and how large-scale campaigns are executed in the real world.
Beyond these adaptations, I also had the opportunity to work on more original creative projects. One of the highlights was producing a video ad for Powerade’s fall football campaign, where I combined existing brand photography with stock video to craft a dynamic piece of content. This project stood out as one of my most rewarding creative contributions of the summer—second only to my AI commercial capstone—and allowed me to push beyond resizing work into actual storytelling.
Capstone Project
My intern capstone project was assigned by my manager, senior designer Andi Fazio, who wanted me to explore how AI could be used in creative design—specifically in the visuals. At first, I wanted to create an AI commercial for BODYARMOR Chill featuring Joe Burrow, one of the brand’s athletes, since his nickname is “Joe Chill.” While the idea was fun, the AI tools struggled with character consistency and the results weren’t professional enough. I pivoted the concept to focus strictly on product visuals, which allowed me to create a polished BODYARMOR product commercial generated almost entirely with AI.
Example of poor character consistency.
Runway generated images with Kling generated motion.
I built a full AI production workflow, testing multiple tools along the way. I experimented with bottle replacement in Runway (replacing old VIS bottles with new VIS ones) and used Photoshop AI for cleanup tasks, though for the final commercial I generated bottles directly and used real product photography only as reference. Still imagery and video were produced using Runway and Kling, then upscaled with Topaz Labs to remove artifacts. A big part of achieving usable results was prompt engineering—refining inputs, iterating on phrasing, and testing variations to get more consistent, high-quality outputs. I generated a voiceover using ElevenLabs from a script I wrote, and finalized the edit in After Effects. The process wasn’t without challenges—AI struggled with rendering text cleanly, video physics often looked unrealistic, and outputs were inconsistent—but each step taught me how to troubleshoot limitations while still being able to move toward a strong final product.
Final Result
The end result was an entirely AI-generated BODYARMOR commercial showcasing product-focused visuals, synced with an AI voiceover and brought together in After Effects. I presented the piece during my final capstone presentation to the C-suite executives, along with insights on how AI could be used now and in the future for creative production. My biggest takeaway was that AI can be a powerful tool for quick-turn, low-budget content like product shots or social ads, but it isn’t yet ready for high-end, campaign-level execution. Even with its flaws, the project became the highlight of my summer—pushing me to experiment, refine workflows, and present a realistic outlook on AI’s role in design and marketing.
