EY has launched an integrated campaign, ‘The Face of the Future’, to promote its recently-launched artificial intelligence (AI) platform, EY.ai. The campaign highlights he need to put humans at the centre of the AI transformation to help deliver on the exponential value the technology provides.
Against a backdrop of real-world business, governmental and societal concerns around the adoption of AI, ‘The Face of the Future’ is an assertion of the EY belief that confidence in AI needs to be instilled by prioritizing a people-first approach. This belief is brought to life through the campaign’s central asset, an ever-changing animated face comprising of the images of more than 200 EY people. It highlights the transformative power of AI across organizations when it is people-centric, while making provocations around AI adoption, posing the question: How can AI help your organization face the future?
“Building confidence in AI requires a holistic and people-centred approach,” said Nicola Morini-Bianzino, EY Global Chief Technology Officer. “As global leaders, organizations and entire industries contemplate the transformative capabilities of AI, we are helping EY clients face the future with confidence by emphasizing this exact approach to AI-enabled business transformation. This campaign reflects the power of EY people, augmented and empowered by AI, in driving the change to build a better working world.”
To produce The Face of the Future, EY enlisted more than 200 of its people from across the world. Each was photographed to create static images that were then animated against a moving face and speaking to a script, using a proprietary AI model.
To highlight every individual’s facial architecture, a specially adapted one-shot StyleGAN was created. From there, a single professional voice recording was transformed using voice AI to develop an unlimited number of new voices that matched the film's moving faces precisely. This process yielded an asset that would previously have been near impossible to deliver and saved hundreds of filming and editing hours.
EY collaborated with several agencies to produce and execute the content-rich integrated campaign, led by creative director Graham Fink of FinkDifferent, who conceived the creative direction in collaboration with Mark Goodwin of SquidInk. The campaign was a joint effort with Ogilvy UK and Hogarth Worldwide on content experience, Not Just Any (NJA) for production, The 5Gs for AI tech and EssenceMediacom for media planning. The EY.ai human-centric logo flowing with an animated 'i' was developed with the support of Brandpie.
The year-long campaign will seek to attain a global reach by kicking off with 30-second TV commercials on several global business channels, such as Bloomberg Television, Euronews, CNBC and through Connected TV. Animated ads will appear on OOH displays in business-focused environments at prominent airports across the world, as well as at high-traffic locations aligned with prominent sporting, entertainment, business and lifestyle events. In addition, campaign will feature prominently across EY channels and online platforms through podcasts, digital, social videos and banners.
