Leading up to the 2018 holiday season, StubHub needed to create a campaign that would inspire shoppers to use StubHub to give the gift of a live experience. The challenge we had in our hands was that getting tickets to a live event is an amazing gift, but the way those tickets are delivered (with an email or a print out) can be a little underwhelming.

Leading up to the 2018 holiday season, StubHub needed to create a campaign that would inspire shoppers to use StubHub to give the gift of a live experience. The challenge we had in our hands was that getting tickets to a live event is an amazing gift, but the way those tickets are delivered (with an email or a print out) can be a little underwhelming. To solve for that, we combined the power of hip hop and artificial intelligence to create a new way to gift wrap tickets: with a personalized rap.

The Gift Rapper allowed users to get a custom rap and video by simply answering a quiz about the event they were buying tickets to and the person receiving the gift. The quiz itself had over 10,000 different results, all resulting in a different rap, written by MC Murs with the help of an AI.

Getting tickets to a live event for someone is an incredibly thoughtful gift: a gift that shows you really know someone. As a part of this campaign we were targeting a group of “thoughtful givers”: those who will buy a birthday gift 6 months early because it was just the perfect thing. They value spending time with their friends and family more than anything else. They are their tribe leaders. They rally the troops, book the dinners reservations or get the concerts tickets for everyone. They value experiences over things.

For these gifters, the idea of printing out a ticket or sending an email doesn’t live up to their standards. It isn’t personal. It isn’t meaningful. It’s transactional. That’s what we set out to change. To give these gifters a tool to delight their family/friends and make the act of receiving a gift as special as the gift itself.

As users were checking out on StubHub, we asked if they wanted their tickets wrapped, leading them to the Gift Rapper website. On the website, we asked a series of seemingly simple questions and, but behind the scenes, an AI was assembling a dynamically-generated rap.

The quiz itself had over 10,000 possible different results, and each answer had a corresponding snippet in the lyrics and time code in the background music. We built a node application that generated all the song variations; for each song, it mixed the audio recordings into a full track, generating subtitles file in a SRT format. To create the final result, the node application combined the voice audio track, background music, motion graphics and subtitles together into a single video. The video could be shared, sent or downloaded. No more impersonal emails. No more computer printouts. Just some holiday delight and a custom rap.

The Gift Rapper site was produced for under $300,000 in 6 weeks including the AI, rap recordings, licensing, copy, design, animation and asset development, video production, web development, hosting, and QA.

The Gift Rapper was used around the world, with raps created in 140 countries. It caught the attention of the hero gifter, generating millions of media impressions, and was also featured at FWA as the Site of the Day. Ultimately, the campaign helped propel StubHub to their largest Cyber Monday ever.