When Johnny Rohrbach and his co-founders launched Silverside AI, they were cold-messaging Coca-Cola executives on LinkedIn more times than they care to admit hoping for a response. A year and a half later, that persistence had produced one of Coca-Cola’s highest-performing ads ever, per data from System1.
Johnny is a co-founder at Silverside, an AI innovation lab and creative production house working with brands including Panasonic, Sazerac, Amazon and Goodwill. Raised in Silicon Valley, he came up through the brand and advertising world before betting his career on a premise that was far from obvious in late 2023: that generative AI would catch up to the ambitions of the marketers who adopted it first, and that when it did, the companies who'd been building workflows in the meantime would have an insurmountable head start. In this conversation, Johnny discusses Silverside’s approach, and why they’ve decided to build on Runway.
Tell me about Silverside's founding. Why go all-in on AI from the start?
It was a bet, with no guarantee it was going to work. At that point, generative AI was nowhere close to where it is now. I remember doing the first Coca-Cola ad in 2024 and it was, in retrospect, a painful exercise in generation, frustration and manipulation. But it was the first step.
What we knew was that marketing as it stood was broken, and there had to be another option. When ChatGPT launched, there was this very small pinprick of light where you're like, okay, there's something here.
What were those early client conversations like?
Few and far between. There was a huge amount of distrust of the technology in the early days. But if you look at every major technology transformation, you quickly realize that innovation will always win. So that was the bet.
The early conversations were not the most pleasant. Most of them were "we're not interested" or they wouldn't even get into a meeting room with us. We did one real POC that first stretch, until we landed our first Coke ad, and that’s when we took off.
What was it about Coca-Cola that made that moment possible?
Coke doesn't necessarily have to innovate. They are the largest beverage company in the world with the most brand recognition. But they have this ethos of always being ahead. And they had just appointed Pratik Thakkar to the Global Head of AI role. At that point, there weren't a lot of people in our space with both the creative firepower and the technology credentials.
It was one of those really serendipitous moments where we created an amazing symbiotic relationship to push the envelope. And then it paid off pretty tremendously. The ad we made is one of Coca-Cola's highest-performing ads ever. The next year, we made a whole new holiday campaign as well as a shot-for-shot remake of the 2024 ad for the North America team, and that became another high performer.
How does Runway fit into your stack?
The Runway partnership is enormous for us. Runway has always been on the very cutting edge of what's possible with creative technology. I remember the first image replacement tools, I remember when Aleph came out. The partnership has been huge for us because we get to walk into rooms and say, we're partnered with them, and this is something we can bring to you and implement.
The second piece is, until about six months ago we were negotiating data protections and indemnities individually with every client based on the models we wanted to use, which is really hard. Now, Runway handles a lot of the third-party model indemnification, and it makes our work significantly easier.
But the biggest benefit is the feedback loop. When Coca-Cola says they need a feature, I can go talk to the team at Runway and say, hey, how do we build this? It's a one-stop shop at the infrastructure layer for us. That access is a game changer when you need to move quickly.
Walk me through how you're actually using Runway across a client engagement.
We use Runway from the very first moment. When we step into any client meeting, we always have something ready to show them before we even get into the meeting – something that makes them go, "my God, this is incredible." That's where Runway's API comes in first, because we can call up models via the API and build these introductory sizzles. I'm a big believer in showing up with something real.
Then once we're in the room, the brief is always drastically different. There's no brief that's ever the same. Unlike traditional production where someone says "I want a 30-second spot," AI has opened this Pandora's box where you can have literally anything you want. And that's not just spots and performance media and social – it's now things like "all of our on-the-ground salespeople need personalized menus for individual accounts." That would historically have been a multimillion-dollar problem nobody would touch. Now they're asking for it in POCs.
So the fact that our tools are as malleable as we are is massively important. Runway gives us a foundation across all those different model types, and then we build the workflow and service infrastructure on top that's specific to that client. Every brief gets its own technology.
What does working with a massive company like Coca-Cola or SVEDKA look like, compared to some of your non-profit work?
Companies like Coke and SVEDKA want an edge. Even beyond the technology, it’s about how you take advantage of proprietary data, historic creative and the insights their teams are generating in collaboration with ours.
On the other side of the spectrum is work like Pierce's Pledge, which is a gun violence prevention organization founded by Leslie Hu. She has a profoundly tragic personal story that she has turned into an absolutely awe-inspiring mission: her son was killed during a custody dispute because there was a gun in the house. There's this very simple message: if you remove a gun from a home during a divorce or custody dispute, those deaths are essentially mitigated. If we can help her spread that awareness, I think it's our obligation.
That's the thing AI has changed. Historically, a mom-and-pop organization or a nonprofit could not get remotely close to a Fortune 500 company on content quality. Now they can. And so it becomes really incumbent on us as practitioners of AI to make sure the people who need that empowerment actually have access to it. AI shouldn’t just be a tool to tell marketing stories, it provides incredible avenues to tell stories that historically haven’t had the budgets to create the content they need.
What's exciting you most about where this is heading?
A few things. Humans—meaning photorealistic synthetic humans—are getting to a place that's really interesting to me. The ability to tell authentic stories without necessarily having a real person physically present. I’m certainly not saying that’s right for everything, but I think about legacy brands whose founders aren't around anymore – there's something really fascinating about being able to tell those origin stories in a way that wasn't possible before.
The bigger idea we're obsessed with is what we call "ideas that have ideas." Every great piece of content lives inside a format. Snickers has "You're not you when you're hungry" – that's a beautiful, simple, endlessly malleable format. What we try to do with our clients is find formats that will serve them for a long time, and then build systems that can blend human creativity with the things happening in the world, fill that format and scale distribution at a level that wasn’t possible before. So you get to think about the fun stuff, and not "oh God, I have to create another daily version of this for social."
