To unpack the immense challenges of the race to exascale and create awareness around it, we took experts out of the lab and placed them in front of the camera to explain the real-world impact of their work and HPE’s critical role to help the U.S. win it — turning highly technical, incredibly dense material into a common language we all could share. The visuals needed to be inspiring, but unambiguous; the voiceovers colloquial, while still technical. We knew this couldn’t be the classic subject matter expert talking head video. It required real ambition and gravitas to pay off the gravity of the stakes.

Anchored by a bespoke landing page experience to launch the nearly seven-minute film, we created supporting social cutdowns to succinctly tell the story that were also housed in a variety of custom ad units. We tailored and amplified those cuts, driving back to the landing page and deeper into HPE’s related topic pages on their dot com, using first and third-party data sources to target the most relevant users.

“Eighteen Zeros” reached a very precise audience. The primary audience was ITDMs, BDMs, and politically-minded people; in a secondary flight, new social cutdowns were created for science and news consumers driving to the full experience. Through targeting and strength of content, we were able to accomplish both a connection with our audience and generally place HPE ahead of the exascale conversation.

• 3.1MM video views of the original film

• 55% of film watched by average viewer of the nearly seven-minute video

• Over 17,000 social actions

• Over 912 cumulative hours spent watching the video during the first flight; a publisher record

Curing cancer. Outsmarting thousand-year storms. Uncovering how the universe was born. Unpacking the stakes to be the first country to build a supercomputer with the ability to run a quintillion calculations per second—that’s a one with eighteen zeros after it—isn’t easy. The implications of an exascale computer would touch nearly every facet of our lives, so we took experts out of the lab and put them in front of the camera to explain the scale and impact of their work in a universally understandable way that didn’t dumb down the subject matter.

For better or worse, the whitepaper is synonymous with the B2B category. They are the go-to media for thought-leadership to communicate a company’s point of view and are distributed and shared as such. But, we knew that trying to convey a topic as intricate and significant as exascale supercomputing required a grander execution — one that had the credibility to connect with HPE’s ITDM (I.T. Decision-Maker) and BDM (Business Decision-Maker) audience who makes impactful tech decisions within their respective organization and the accessibility for the general politically-minded public to digest, so we brought the story’s stakes to life through a shortform original film.

“Eighteen Zeros” features original animation and a symmetric/dramatic interview style that felt as big as exascale. This aesthetic, though, only thrives because the story is grounded in research, expert insight and many days of thought and discussion.

Great leaps in technology can change the course of human history — and whoever controls that technology, holds the keys to innovation and discovery. In 2017, the U.S. Department of Energy tapped six elite teams to build the fastest supercomputer on the planet. Hewlett Packard Enterprise was one of those six that accepted the challenge.

HPE needed a way to unpack their significant stake to help the U.S. win this most-important race, exploring the power and possibilities of exascale computing. Why are the stakes for the U.S. so high? It is the space race of this century.