Driven By Intuition
Lexus Europe
Issue 49 | December 2018
Agency
The & Partnership London
Creative Team
Executive Creative Directors Yan Elliott, Micky Tudor Copywriters Dave Bedwood, AI Creative Creative Strategy Lead Matthew Bamford-Bowes
Production Team
Head of Film Charles Crisp Producer Rick Carter Head of Art Marc Donaldson AI Developers Visual Voice Co-Founders Alex Newland, Will Nutbrown Production Company Carnage Director Kevin Macdonald Post House Bigbuoy
Other Credits
Business Director Benedict Pringle Account Director Jamie Harris, Cat Lynch Research MindX, University of New South Wales, Australia Cognitive Neuroscientists Joel Pearson, Sebastian Rogers Client General Manager, Brand Communications Michael Tripp Senior Manager Brand & Communications Vincent Tabel
Date
November 2018
Background
The & Partnership has had a history of successful campaigns for Lexus highlighting the brand’s credentials as being at the edge of technical innovation, testing the boundaries of humans and machines working together.
The 2015 “Hoverboard Project”, for instance, received worldwide coverage when Lexus engineers used magnetic levitation to create a hoverboard like the one in the film “Back to the Future.” In 2018, Lexus wanted an idea that would showcase the uniquely responsive features of the new Lexus ES, a car that responds intuitively to its driver’s intentions and to the changing road and traffic conditions.
Idea
A script for a 60-second film was written by AI. In collaboration with IBM Watson and tech partner Visual Voice, an automated script-writer was put to work.
It was “trained” by absorbing the data from 15 years of Cannes Lions car and luxury goods advertising. It was primed with emotional intelligence data from Unruly to teach it which moments in those TV spots connected most strongly with viewers and then it was coached in intuition via a bespoke experiment by applied scientists MindX at the University of New South Wales.
The bot then got to work, producing a script that told a story of surprising emotional depth. It tells the story of a Lexus Takumi Master Craftsman who, having worked painstakingly on the new Lexus ES, releases his finished car out into the world only for it to be kidnapped and nearly destroyed. At the crucial moment, however, the car comes to life to avoid its own test crash, thus demonstrating the engineering and design features that make the new ES Lexus’s most intuitive model to date.
Finally, the AI’s script was brought to life by Oscar-winning director Kevin Macdonald.
He has been quoted as saying: “The charmingly simplistic way the AI wrote the story was both fascinating in its interpretation of human emotion, and yet still unexpected enough to give the film a clearly non-human edge.”
Results
Unknown
Our Thoughts
The campaign is still so new for any meaningful results but the PR generated has already been extraordinary. It has created a furore in the Twittersphere as copywriters debate whether this is the beginning of the end of creativity.
Of course, someone had to have the original idea of the bot itself. But will his creation steal Dave Bedwood’s job from him in some dystopian tragedy? Unlikely.
In fact, it might well help him get a payrise since his CEO at The & Partnership coincidentally happens to be the current President of the UK’s IPA, the professional body representing the ad industry.
Her two-year Presidency is to be devoted to an agenda of “Magic and the Machines”, her mission to get agencies and clients embracing “our new colleagues, the machines”.
Will this film win awards? Well, if judged by Pearl (featured in Directory 45), the bot created by the Belgian Association of Marketing to judge their annual MIXX Awards, maybe.