Humans 1, 2 and 3
for Channel 4
Humans is a drama, where the new must-have gadget is a ‘Synth’, a robotic android with artificial intelligence eerily close to humans. The brief was to excite a 16-34 audience about the show with a noisy and innovative campaign to strengthen Channel 4’s reputation for top-quality drama.
Series 1. Persona Synthetics
We brought synthetic humans into the real world, by making it appear they were available to purchase.
We launched a TV promo without any Channel 4 branding, set up two auctions in an eBay partnership (the first time eBay allowed auctions for a fake product), created social accounts with product updates, and secured a shopfront in Regent Street.
Partnering with Microsoft we set up two 90″ screens and a Kinect with 3D models of our synths following passers-by and beckoning them over for a product demo.
All activity carried #Humans and pushed to personasynthetics.com, closing the loop and pushing to ep 1.
BAFTA for Digital Creativity
The site had over a million hits with the majority coming through organic search, and trended no. 1 on Twitter and Google. The earned media was astounding with publications all over the world.
The campaign has received over 30 awards including a BAFTA for digital creativity and 2 Grand Prix’s. Check out our extremely awkward BAFTA acceptance speech below.
Series 2. Product Recall
The second series of Humans focussed on consumer Synths gaining consciousness. We reused Persona Synthetics to reach new audiences by fueling the excitement of the existing fanbase.
We launched a product recall for these ‘malfunctioning’ Synths, drawing inspiration from real-world product recalls happening at the time from brands such as Samsung and Tesco.
We rolled this out across press, social, tv, web, DHL delivery trucks and even got the New Scientist to interview a spokesperson from Persona Synthetics.
A first of its kind chatbot experience
In a European entertainment first, we wrote a narrative-driven ChatBot with over 600 lines of dialogue, partnering with Facebook Creative Shop and San Fran startup PullString. The premise was speaking to a Synth customer service advisor, which gains consciousness and asks for your help escaping in a gamified conversation experience.
Campaign Top 10 Innovation
The campaign received plenty of press pickup with articles in publications such as Campaign Magazine, Radio Times, Creative Review, and AdAge to name a few. The Chatbot was named as Facebook Awards Campaign of the month and listed in Campaigns’ top 10 innovations for 2016, BAFTA Nominated and picked up numerous industry awards.
Series 3. The Human Test
The massive increase of voice assistants in UK homes stood out to me as a brilliant opportunity to leverage this new and exciting technology as part of our campaign for the 3rd series of Humans. For the first time in history, consumers were going out and buying these kinds of devices – not too dissimilar from the AI featured in the show.
Working with ScreenMedia, we launched ‘The Human Test’. Inspired by the Myers Briggs and Turing Tests, we developed a series of questions to work out whether users are Human or Synthetic. We pushed to the Google Home and Amazon Echo experience using TV, social, and radio announcements.
Campaign Pick of the Week
The Campaign received a bunch of positive press and a few awards to boot, including Gold for Best Integrated Campaign at Creative Circle and a D&AD Pencil.
“The best of British creativity”
— Campaign