After five years R&D development Mediacells has been awarded the trademark for Audience Engineering (AE), a business insights system to inform performance decisions for rights owners and sponsors.
To mark the occasion the Mediacells team wanted to use AE to produce a unique, creative identity.
We decided to embark on a new creative path for our business intelligence agency an we are delighted to launch the new campaign which is a true, organic blend of the best of AI and UK digital craftsmanship.
The first stop was to employ an AI explorer to assess generative content possibilities, navigating Midjourney, ChatGPT and a selection of bespoke brand development AI apps.
”For the campaign, it was never our intention to use the AI content as the ultimate output but it was a good focus for the team to zone in on the proposition. Using generative AI tools enabled us to get through the time-robbing phases of the campaign conception and allowed us to accelerate the direction rather than a destination.” Chief Executive Officer, Brad Rees
Mediacells hired ex-head of Marketing for the FT, Yehuda Shapiro as the brand messaging consultant, who applied rigour to the communications by eliciting insights from the management team through a series of proposition sessions that lead to concrete, measurable objectives, deliverables, timelines and deadlines.
Yehuda condensed a complex set of data disciplines to a sequence of five: Design, Engineering, Science, Analytics and Reporting.
Next stop was to recruit experienced print designer, Mark Willey, an experienced print designer, to transform the drafted AI visuals, colourways, fonts and logos into a unified, meaningful brand identity with assets that could scale from social media graphics to 4K animations.
Embracing the generative AI offerings and influenced by 15th Century architectural isometric grids of Leonardo da Vinci, Mark provided the source content for the creative activations.
The visual impact had to be human and after much photo-questing – an image of audience delight presented itself at the eleventh hour.
The design element drew heavily from 1950s architectural blueprint tearsheets, which aimed to distance Audience Engineering‰ from the impersonal monolithic nature of data architecture. When it came to the heavy lifting element of data engineering a high-rise build feel projected solid foundations and rapid scale.
The scientific element of Audience Engineering referenced the Information is Beautiful books of David McCandless to conjure the infinite value of data in a single graphic. For the Analytics discipline Mark drew from Lewis Carroll’s Alice Through the Looking Glass, to show the transformation from Science to Analysis
Finally, the crystallisation of each sequence into a unified, meaningful whole concatenated each visual, from the foundations up, to show the power of complex audience data in the right hands.
The creative output was so powerful that Mediacells commissioned movie animators Reflective Films to take the vector illustrations Mark had produced and animate them into a reductive storyline.
This article originally appeared in New Digital Age on June 21, 2023