Our macro brief was to create two engaging & thought-provoking documentaries for the Tomorrow Unlocked channel to drive engagement and subscribers.

Rainer Bock (Head of content for Tomorrow Unlocked) describes the brief in more detail as follows:

“Kaspersky’s brand tagline is ‘Bring on the Future’. Hence, Tomorrow Unlocked was created to develop relevant, entertaining and educating content about how technology might shape our future. Within our portfolio, the Imagine Beyond series tells – often quite controversial – stories about how human bodies and minds might get altered by tech. While the episodes before showcased practical use-cases of human augmentation, we redefined the approach for these films.

The two latest episodes about cryonics and the future of sex were on the edge, in-depth and designed to spark discussions – the kind of content that works best with our growth-targets.”

Episode one, Who Wants to Live Forever? delves into the practicality of one of humankind’s oldest dreams: Eternal life. From a radical new global movement to seriously intricate tech therapy, longer life might be achievable sooner than we think. But how will it change us?

Episode two, Build Me Somebody To Love, takes a dive into the world of those looking to build robots and AI that we can form relationships with and perhaps even, love. From the world’s first sex robot brothel to the visionaries who want to revolutionise elderly care, human to human contact may soon be replaced in sweeping ways. But how will it change us? To support the launch of this documentary we had ‘Sylvia’ (a VR porn avatar who features in the documentary) interview two adult film actresses (Jessa Jordan and Stoya) about the future of sex and technology on Instagram.

The Imagine Beyond documentary series was created to explore how technology could change what it means to be human, linking directly into Kaspersky’s brand promise ‘Bring on the future’. Our strategy when devising episodes was to identify key aspects to what makes us human and explore how they are being disrupted by emerging technologies. No two themes define humanity more than sex and death, so we created our documentaries around these themes.

In order to produce the documentary, we first identified key themes that define humanity (in this case sex & death) and then went about securing access to experts, pioneers and technologists to unpack how technologies could challenge it. For ‘Who wants to live forever’ this meant travelling to Scottsdale Arizona to meet a community of immortalists & visit a cryogenic freezing lab, Oxford university to speak to an academic transhumanist and to a hospital in Belgium to speak to neuroscientists studying how we define consciousness. For ‘Build me somebody to love’ we traveled across Europe to shoot a VR brothel in Prague, multisensory cybersex in London, Italian roboticists working to combat loneliness in the elderly and a variety of experts across multiple fields and countries. We began exploring territories in April 2020 and the first episode premiered on Kaspersky’s Tomorrow Unlocked channel on 28th December 2020.

The videos have had over 3.4m views so far and are approaching 8000 comments on Youtube. The majority of these views were for “Who wants to live forever”, while “Build me somebody to love” did a great job of driving conversation with a new audience through it’s influencer activation. The interviews between our VR porn avatar Sylvia and adult entertainment influencers Jessa Jordan and Stoya (which were seen by over 35k people and had almost 100 comments) successfully directed a new audience to the Tomorrow Unlocked channel.

“‘Who wants to live forever’ has performed very well and while the views on ‘Build me somebody to love’ were low due to the age restriction, all other indicators are great: viewer retention, like/dislike ratio and engagement rates, are far above channel average.” - Rainer Bock, Head of content for Tomorrow Unlocked.