DEPT Pioneer

The experience gave us an engaging reason to speak to our audience, making it less about talking about us and more about them.

At a very individual level, whether it’s a horoscope or personality quiz, we all love to find something out about ourselves or validate something we already suspected. So we tapped into this very human insight to pose the question “What kind of pioneer are you?” – following this navigation thread led you through a series of questions and interactions with our own Ai, called “Entity”, before landing on a base of curated content just for you.

The other navigation path allowed you to bypass the “Entity” and head straight for that sweet sweet content – a number of hyper relevant thought pieces and case studies from within DEPT® to further hammer home our pioneering credentials.

This site ran alongside a number of other campaign activities including digital out of home, online video (more about that later) and social and industry press partnerships. It also served as real world touchpoint at our launch events globally across DEPT® offices and provided something clients could share on social to further spread and endorse our pioneering message.

Using our own WebGL framework tightly coupled with a Nuxt.js frontend we managed to represent the “magic at one’s fingertips” feeling that comes with interacting with a modern AI model in 2023.

The back and forth is not visualized using the classic AI chatbot-format but more as a dialogue with a shape-shifting, real-time,  point-cloud that shifts shape between being a human-like entity, a cloud processing information or representation of real-life objects for answering your questions.

As the user is presented with a question we enrich both the user’s answer and the reply from the “AI Entity” using OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 model. Depending if you’re answering as a user with an email tied to IKEA, IBM or a local bakery the dialogue will continue in the context of who you identify yourself as. Creepy? We say…cool!

In a bold move away from the usual human-centric visuals of DEPT®’s other marketing – our short promo for the “Prepare to Pioneer” campaign tells the story of the evolution of the first particle – the pioneer if you will – that gave birth to the main “Entity” character of the website experience and hero of all OOH and print materials.

Borne from the masses of mundane cuboid particles, our “pioneer” re-imagines itself, experimenting…changing shape and eventually soaring – setting in motion a chain of events that affects all those around them. From one pioneer massive important change can arise.

Made over 3 weeks, each shot needed to be “programmed” first in Houdini before choosing the right camera angles to tell our story the best way possible.