As the next chapter of Rémy Martin’s partnership with multi-platinum musical artist Usher, the brand wanted to honor and commemorate the 25th anniversary of his breakthrough album My Way and the launch of his Las Vegas residency. Rémy Martin needed a breakthrough idea that demonstrated the brand’s commitment to excellence while challenging the traditions of the category in a unique way.

As AI technology was gaining mainstream traction as a way of turning words into images, we saw an opportunity to illustrate something different and showcase our product–its signature features and design–in a new way.

In other words, to make the invisible, visible and the intangible a reality.

Leveraging AI technology and descriptions of Rémy Martin 1738 from musician and brand spokesman Usher, we designed a Limited Edition that illustrates the taste of Rémy’s iconic product. Using Generative Adversarial Neural Networks and Contrastive Language–Image Pre-Training–tools that translate words into images–we turned Usher’s words into a first of its kind design that put taste front and center on the product and packaging.

Taste is something that everyone experiences, but is impossible to visualize. But technology today is making what was once impossible, possible. Using Usher’s own musical vocabulary to describe his olfactory experience of Rémy Martin 1738, we fed his words through AI technology to create a depiction of the tasting notes, the resulting artwork being used as the design for a limited edition bottle.

The bottle was designed using Usher’s prompts as a baseline, using 4 of his descriptions as prompts, and feeding them through multiple visual AI creation platforms databases with over 400 million images. We explored expanding certain words and feelings with more descriptive language to bolster Usher’s tasting notes. Through multiple rounds of prompts and results, we then further art directed the AI-created art to generate our final target of 4 images and had our team of artists and designers create original artwork that was inspired by the raw results, using digital tools augmented with additional layers of processing.

The campaign ran from July 25th - August 10th with a video clip, social media, out of home, and experiential presence during Usher residency in Las Vegas. The bottle itself was sold on BlockBar as an NFT, each uniquely marked and securely stored on the blockchain, to be resold on the marketplace or redeemed for the physical bottle.

We reached an astounding audience upon launch, garnering 485k engagements for an engagement rate of 6.20% during the campaign’s run. Our earned media included 140 articles, 380m+ views across channels and 3.7b+ impressions. Most importantly though, the USHER X AI LTE Bottle sold out in 2 seconds