Unlock powerful ideas for your business or brand.
Pioneering machine learning models for creators, advertisers, marketing agencies and more.
At 55mV we want to help everyone realise their creative potential. We build machine learning databases, tools and architecture that power creativity. Thunderbucket is where that work comes together.
What is Thunderbucket
A creative strategist that reasons in the open.
Most idea generators take a prompt and hand back a list in one go. Thunderbucket does what a good strategist and a creative team do in a room: it works the brief in many steps, decides what to do next from what it has learned so far, and keeps only what survives. You watch every move, you can step in at any point, and what comes back is a shortlist you can argue with, with the reasons behind the order and a record of what it tried and rejected on the way.
How it works
It reads the brief like a strategist
What is really being asked, who it is for, and what the category has already done. It pulls prior work and marks whole territories as taken before it writes a word.
It explores, and rules things out
It goes looking for a tension worth building on, borrows mechanisms from far-away places, and says out loud why a direction is dead. Every move is on screen as it happens.
It drafts, tests and keeps score
Each idea is written, then judged on the questions a creative director would ask. Weak ones are parked, not deleted, and can be pulled back out if the brief turns.
It shortlists, and shows its reasons
A ranked shortlist with a score on every idea, the honest read on each, and why the order is what it is. Nudge it at any point and the loop carries on from where it was.
Three ways in
From a brief
Paste a brief, or ask for a campaign in a sentence. Pick a persona for the voice and the risk you want. Watch it work, then push it: more around this, weirder, safer, a different format.
From a picture
Hand it a picture from a completely different world. It looks at every object in it, asks what each one is really doing, and gives each one a new job for a brand. Five fresh ideas from one image, and any of them can be turned again.
Provoked by pictures
Working a brief, it can draw random pictures from the library and hold them against the problem, the way a creative team pins unrelated things on the wall to break a loop.
How we judge ideas
Scored the way a creative director scores, and tested against them.
Every idea Thunderbucket keeps is judged on the questions a creative director asks before an idea leaves the building:
- Is it original, or has the category seen it before?
- Is there a human truth in it that real people would recognise?
- Does it tell a story, or just make a claim?
- Would it get talked about?
- Would it work for the business?
- Is it single-minded, and does it break none of the rules a brand sets?
Scores are the system's own estimates, so we do not ask anyone to take them on faith. Working creatives are testing Thunderbucket on real briefs, blind, against the ideas they would have reached for themselves. Their verdicts, and the comparison, will be published here as they come in.
Our model
A writer trained on how creative directors judge ideas.
Alongside Thunderbucket we train a model of our own. Where most systems learn from whatever is on the internet, ours learns from ideas that working creative directors have reviewed, repaired and ranked, so it is taught what a good idea looks like, not just what a plausible one looks like.
It is small enough to be housed by an agency or a client on their own machines, and it is the writer we are building Thunderbucket towards. Try it on your brief next to Thunderbucket and compare. Evaluation results will appear here as they are published.
It writes the idea, and its genome
Every idea comes with the handful of parts that make it what it is: who it is for, the tension it works, the mechanism, the twist, the tone, the format. The idea is never a blur of words; its parts are on the table.
It turns one part at a time
Like turning one face of a puzzle cube, the model changes a single part and keeps the rest, so one good idea becomes a family of real alternatives rather than five rewrites of the same thought. That is where its range and its surprises come from.
Every turn is scored
Each variant is judged on the same questions as everything else here, so the ones that survive are different for a reason, not different for the sake of it.
