Bic rewrites Shakespeare with AI for Cristal pen’s 75th anniversary

French company Bic recently launched a marketing effort, 'One Bic, One Book, Two Classics', in which it combined the Bic Cristal pen and a robot to produce a Romeo and Juliet manuscript that mimics William Shakespeare’s handwriting. 

The campaign was timed to celebrate the 75-year anniversary of the company releasing the Cristal pen.

The manuscript is a “tribute right to one of the greatest writers of all time, and it's also a tribute to the writing itself,” said Marcelo Felício, creative director for VML São Paulo, the agency that worked with Bic on the campaign. “We know that writing by hand helps retain knowledge, stimulates creativity [and AI] is a tool to help us in our daily routine.”

The creatives behind the campaign came up with the idea of using a Bic pen to write a Shakespeare manuscript about six years ago, but the cost of hiring a calligrapher and typographer was prohibitive, Felício said.

Since then, technology companies have, of course, released new AI tools. The marketers based the manuscript on what scholars say is the only document with Shakespeare’s handwriting.

They then used software such as Stable Diffusion, Adobe Illustrator and FontCreator; a robot; and the Bic pen to write the 212-page book.

Felicio said the creatives wanted to have variation on letters in the document, the way it would look if a human had written it, so that one “a” looks slightly different from another “a.” The aim was to show that the Bic pen contains enough ink to write up to three kilometers.

“It seems so abstracted, not very tangible, so we decided to write an entire book to prove this capability of Bic’s pen,” Felício said.

They used Shakespeare because they wanted an author who is known around the world, Felício said.

The brand held an event Jan. 30 at the Real Gabinete Português de Leitura, a library in Rio de Janeiro, where it presented the manuscript to the institution’s president, Francisco Gomes da Costa, to add to its archive. The team invited Brazilian influencers to attend.

It also held an event for press the same day in São Paulo and showed a short video about the making of the manuscript. 

The campaign was aimed at teenagers, Felício said, and timed to coincide with the start of the school year in Brazil, which typically begins in early February.

In addition to VML, the brand worked with Hogarth Worldwide Brazil and Bolha on production.