We had already established Persona Synthetics with the season 1 campaign when we brought their products into the real world. This series ended on a major cliff-hanger – would the key to consciousness be released, causing Synths all over the world to ‘wake up’?  To promote the show returning and tease the exciting ‘conscious awakening’ storyline, we wanted to take the public on an immersive and more complex journey, bringing the world of the show even closer to our own. We did this by imagining how Persona Synthetics would respond to their products ‘waking up’ and essentially malfunctioning, with a product recall. The center piece of this campaign was an innovative Facebook Messenger chat bot, built with real AI, giving viewers the chance to interact in real time with a Synthetic Human.

We partnered directly with Facebook Creative Shop and PullString, a San Francisco tech firm headed by ex-Pixar engineers, using their brand-new platform for conversational AI technology. Over 700 lines of dialogue were written for the Bot to make the conversation feel as natural and responsive as possible. Each player will have a unique conversation based on what they input. The experience starts out as a conversation with one of Persona Synthetics’ customer service Synths, until suddenly the Synth gains consciousness and starts to question the world around it. The user then has to decide whether to help them escape Persona’s clutches or report them for ‘recalibration’. Easter Eggs are also hidden throughout the campaign for super-fans to find, if the right questions are asked.

The Facebook Chat bot was the centre piece of the campaign and has been a huge success. It was a European entertainment first, earned Facebook EMEA campaign of the month and has helped the campaign go on to receive a BAFTA Nomination for Digital Creativity. It’s been cited as best in class in multiple publications and has had over 5 million messages exchanged to date. Facebook now use this in presentations around the world as a best in class Chat Bot example for other clients to use as inspiration for their campaigns. We also snuck in a little Turing test to see how people would respond, and over 70% of players thought they were speaking with a human.