An audio daytrip - from your desk.
The interactive 3-D soundscape that allows you to drive, explore and escape.
In a world where people value experiences over things, we wanted to present the BMW 2 Series Active Tourer as a lifestyle car that allows people to escape to a richer, more fulfilling place. So we created The Immersion, an interactive site that used the transporting medium of sound to evoke an image and generate an emotional connection.
Using binaural recording of real sounds created an authentic experience.The interactive console allowed people to customise their journey. Users got to immerse themselves in the sound journey. A visualiser illustrated different environments and adjusted to the mood.
People spent over 500 hours of time listening to the audio. This converted to almost 20 days of listening, imagining and immersing into the BMW Active Tourer.
My role in this project was in the conceptualisation of the idea, the copywriting and in overrseeing the creation of its different elements from a creative perspective.
CREDITS
Creative Director: Ryan McManus
Art Director: Alice Marrollo
Copywriter: Gisele Human
Concept Team: Gisele Human & Alice Marrollo
Web Development: Jethro Flanagan
Sound Design: Simon Malherbe
Project Management: Heidi Thietz
TO EXPERIENCE THE REAL THING, GO TO WWW.2ACTIVETOURER.CO.ZA
To hear the sound clips, visit https://soundcloud.com/gisele-3/sets/bmw-soundscape-immersion
The following article was written by me and published as an account of the creative process behind the BMW Soundscape Immersion.
Media release
April 2015
IT’S TIME TO IMMERSE OURSELVES INTO THE DIGITAL FUTURE
By Gisele Human | Copywriter NATIVE VML
Increasingly invasive online advertising campaigns are experiencing pushback from consumers who, flooded with data overload from a variety of sources, can take it no more. As a creative working in the advertising industry, it’s impossible not to take this to heart. Splash screens, pop-ups, full page take-overs, pop-unders that open a new window without you asking for it, the ad that follows you around from one site to the next: these are the things that are killing the vibe, and giving us a bad reputation.
Perhaps even more significant is the pushback that comes from the human brain, which has a limited, short-term memory. A recent study suggested that people have up to 50 000 thoughts per day. If you consider exposure to 24-hour television, the second screen via mobile and store experiences packed to the brim with messaging, we’re voluntarily inundating ourselves with the equivalent to 174 newspapers of information, per person, per day. A lot of numbers have been tossed around but statistics suggest between 300 and 700 marketing messages are seen per day. You don’t need to be a statistician to recognise that this is more information than we’re able to cognate.
For an advertiser with a conscience, this is the challenging whirlpool we’re trying to not drown in. The odds are against us. And so either we must make an ad that is bright and flashy and reaches our target market because they’ve got A.D.D or we need to face the wrath of our client.
Right? Wrong.
Technology and the Internet hold the kind of potential, both for advertisers and inventors, to engineer an experience that is unlike anything we’ve had before. We live in the age of self-driving cars, smart contact lenses and technology that could support people with Parkinson’s disease. The humble beginnings of virtual reality have seen architects walk through a digital reproduction of a house before the foundations have been laid; a professional dancer with a knee injury can practice her routine mentally; a father and daughter can play tennis despite living in different countries.
If this is the backdrop against which we work, the ad NATIVE VML most recently put out feeds directly into this world. Launching the new BMW 2 Series Active Tourer, a car that reflected a departure from the flashy, performance-driven former self of BMW towards a more down-to-earth, family-next-door kind of car, we created ‘The Immersion’. This is an interactive website that used the medium of sound to captivate the user’s imagination by transporting them to a place that is completely different (nature) to their surroundings (the office). By recording authentic sounds from a range of different environments (the ocean, the city, the mountains) using 3D binaural technology, we created an online reflection of the feeling you get when you go on a road trip, when it rains and you’re driving through the city at night, when it’s early morning and you’re driving along the coast past the ocean, the trees, the fanning vineyards. The online experience encouraged users to close their eyes, sit back, and, using our ad as a trigger, experience a greater, much richer imagined ‘Immersion’ fuelled by the sounds of nature.
Although we measured time spent on the website and the level of interactivity that the site generated, the true affectivity of the ad was impossible to gauge since we could not properly determine to what extent our users took it all in as their own experience. But given time, metrics will be developed and a true reflection of levels of immersion can and will be determined. And when that happens, surely an imagination-fuelled advert that could be customised by the user’s thoughts is the future of advertising?
Check out NATIVE VML’s BMW 2 Series Active Tourer Interactive Immersion here:
http://2activetourer.co.za/
