With AI the hottest technological topic of the last two years, the conversation burns brightest in the sector that puts it into people’s hands. In the scramble to release a new generation of AI enabled computers Lenovo, a brand whose mission is Smarter Technology for All, wanted to be at the vanguard of AI as a force for good.
The problem is, AI is like a tech wild west. Unregulated, the hype cycle narrative has shifted from possibility to scrutiny with questions around accuracy, ethics and intellectual theft negatively impacting the conversation.
Lenovo needed to show how AI could be used imaginatively and positively — in the eyes of a tech forward generation who rarely considered the brand: Gen Z.
Any parent with teenagers knows young people live two lives: one in the real world and one online. They create online personas freely through gaming, forums and social media, where they can express themselves with no judgement.
However, Lenovo’s research showed the divide between these dual lives was creating significant issues. 60% of Gen Z wished they could ‘have difficult conversations with loved ones’ in the real world, the way they did online. 49% said they ‘only felt comfortable expressing themselves online’, leading to mental health issues like social anxiety.
AI was perfect for dramatizing the divide between worlds and generations. What if we could use AI to bring someone’s online world to life? What if this avatar could have a conversation with someone they loved — one they’d never been able to?
Meet Your Digital Self was born. Unfortunately, the AI technology required to give a digital avatar real-time conversational ability like a human hadn’t been.
Enter Kaleida, the UK’s most innovative holographic studio. They combined disparate AI tools with their own proprietary technology. Facial recreation AI and vocal clones would be used to create exact replicas of our avatars faces and voices. Persona driven machine learning would scan social media to replicate natural speech patterns. A 200-camera scanning rig would capture body movements in ultra-high 3D.
Then began the process of finding our Gen Z candidates. They needed to have an interesting backstory, a data-rich online ‘footprint’ to inform the avatar, and identify with the conflicting tensions between the real and digital world. Plus, they had to be psychologically comfortable talking with their digital selves while being filmed.
Two months; 1,961 submissions; 506 videos and 39 hours of call backs with our director Ismail Shallis later, two brave young people were cast.
Oscar Jackson-Walsh struggled with bullying. So, they created an online persona, Spider, to escape this reality. Oscar described Spider as “the real me” because it allowed them to “project all the things I want to be in real life”.
Chinatsu, from Tokyo, is a plus-sized model challenging Japanese societal norms but struggling with shyness in-person. Despite her modelling success, she hid her online persona from her family.
Day 1 of the shoot. Oscar and Chinatsu stood in front of their digital selves for the first time. Then, in what was the entire social experiment’s most emotionally charged moment, Oscar introduced their digital self to their Gran, Nunu, who though supportive and loving had never truly understood their online identity. For Chinatsu the conversation involved revealing to her mum, Rei, her career as a plus-sized model.
Nunu and Rei asked these digital versions questions — ones they’d never felt able to ask in real life. This broke down barriers generating deeper, cross-generational understanding. We captured each encounter in a series of powerful videos. We also partnered with the mental health charity, SHOUT, to provide 24/7 text message counselling for any young person who needed help with these issues.
The campaign generated an increase of 800+ daily inbound conversations about mental health struggles to NGO, Shout, in its first two weeks: a 58% increase in daily traffic. It generated 62K unique views to its website and 74K impressions on its social channels.
It delivered 1850+ pieces of earned within the first month of launch (UK, Japan, US). 90% included core messaging and 91% were standalone features.
On TikTok, the video hit 9.6 million views and 2K likes. On YouTube the video hit 14.3million views in the first two weeks (14 million in total). The campaign generated 197m UK social impressions.
Sarah Kendrick, Clinical Director, Shout said: “The type of AI innovation in Lenovo’s social experiment shows huge promise as a way in which generations with different awareness of online personas can meet and understand each other.”
This was a genuine first for Lenovo, putting their technology to the test.
But it proved to be more than that. It demonstrated how technology could hold the key to using AI as potential future therapy. Such an ambitious project wasn’t cheap (including a 25k donation to SHOUT). But if we measure success in terms of pounds in versus positive change out, the ROI was huge. And while AI might still be the wild west, Lenovo was able to lasso a part of it, for good.
