Responses by Mark Wordsworth, executive producer, Dogstudio/DEPT.

Background: One of the biggest challenges when promoting your own agency is how to show people what you do, not just tell. Like the old saying goes: “Don’t tell me you’re funny. Tell me a joke.”

When we launched our Prepare to Pioneer campaign to promote our services to prospective agency clients, we needed to create an experience that demonstrated our pioneering spirit and skills. 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?” And we paired this with an execution that brought to life the best of our pioneering skillsets. The experience also served to personally curate a number of hyper-relevant thought pieces and case studies from within DEPT to further hammer home our pioneering credentials.

The site ran alongside a number of other campaign activities, including digital OOH, online video, and social and industry press partnerships. It also served as a 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.

Design core: The core feature for us was bringing the AI “Entity” to life. You could always go further and add, add, add, but we are super happy with where we ended for the look and feel of Entity, how we transition between the various content states and the beautiful AI-produced voice.

Technology: Prepare to Pioneer was built using our internal WebGL library AstroGL together with a Nuxt.js front end. The back end is a thin layer of lambda methods that interfaces with the GPT-3.5 API and Sanity.io, our CMS of choice. All the enrichment of the data input, as well as the recommendation engine, uses OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 API tuned with our very own library of marketing content.

Challenges: Working with this relatively new AI technology and figuring out where we can go with it and what its limitations were. We basically figured things out as we went and pivoted constantly.

Alternate possibilities: We would definitely add more time in development to play around with the GPT model and how it reacts to our questions and the user’s input.

Navigational structure: We decided early on that we should have two paths for discovery: the red pill route and the blue pill. The “red pill” route would figure you out and your preferences via a path of questions and interactions. The “blue pill” would take you straight to the end content curated by topic—none of the fourth wall–busting jiggery pokery. So, the question remains: Which pill would you take?