EY launches creative marketing campaign

KUALA LUMPUR: Multinational professional services company Ernst & Young (EY) has launched a new and fully integrated global marketing campaign entitled “The Face of the Future”.

Through this campaign, EY promotes its recently launched unifying artificial intelligence (AI) platform, EY.ai, highlighting the 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 prioritising a people-first approach.

This belief is brought to life through the campaign’s central asset, an ever-changing animated face comprising the images of more than 200 EY people.

It highlights the transformative power of AI across organisations when it is people-centric while making provocations around AI adoption, posing the question: How can AI help your organisation face the future?

The asset was developed with leading AI visual and voice technology typically used in blockbuster movie productions.

It embodies the power of EY people in driving positive AI-led transformation and forms the core of an omni-channel campaign intended to engage audiences across TV, out-of-home (OOH) advertising, digital, social media, and other EY properties.

Nicola Morini-Bianzino, EY global chief technology officer, said: “Building confidence in AI requires a holistic and people-centered approach.

“As global leaders, organisations and entire industries contemplate the transformative capabilities of AI, we are helping EY clients face the future with confidence by emphasising 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,” she said in a statement.

To produce The Face of the Future the global organisation enlisted more than 200 EY 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 used.

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.

Meanwhile, John Rudaizky, EY global brand and experiences leader, said:, “The Face of the Future is not only an extension of the EY long-standing commitment to AI innovation but underlines the organisation’s belief that people must be augmented by technology, not in service of it.

“EY aspires to build a brand that is synonymous with leading on AI and this campaign will serve to show EY clients, people and communities alike how we are doing just that – by placing people at the centre of AI to create exponential value.”

EY collaborated with several agencies to produce and execute the content-rich integrated campaign, led by world-leading 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 and Hogarth Worldwide on content experience, 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 would 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, The Face of the Future would feature prominently across EY channels and online platforms through podcasts, digital, social videos and banners.