chapter 1 Puma x maya

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Introduction

The PUMA Future Rider is a modern iteration of a classic shoe and when it came to introducing the shoe to Southeast Asia (SEA) we decided to follow in that same train of thought.

As it's been proven to work time and time again, PUMA wanted to run an influencer-based campaign but only had the budget to enlist in one major key-opinion leader (KOL) to tackle the whole SEA market. Based on the brief we understood that this KOL had to be someone that could cut across and relate to the whole SEA region. That influencer did not exist, yet...

Campaign

Case study

With SEA being so eclectic with a huge melting pot of cultures, it was impossible to find an existing human being that could portray all the highlights of being a Southeast Asian. So, we decided to create one.

Enter Maya. The world's first user-generated virtual influencer birthed with the help of all Southeast Asians with the purpose of highlighting SEA's greatest features.

the video

Our campaign video had two functions. Firstly it served as a fashion lookbook for the Future Rider and secondly, it served as the thematic origin story of how Maya was brought into the "real world". It showed three of Southeast Asia's biggest influencers, Tosh Zhang from Singapore, Adipati Dolken from Indonesia, and Ismail Izzani from Malaysia being transported into Rider World through an old arcade machine. There they had to each complete multiple tasks to unlock Maya and bring her back with them into the real world.

Behind the scenes

We wanted to create a fashion video that pushed boundaries when compared to other typical fashion advertisements. To start we decided that at no point would feature the shoe in "real life" and instead we only showed it in its 3D form. This gave the allure that the shoes were the object that gave them their powers in Rider World. To do this, the video took a sum total of four teams working together. There was a production house to help direct, edit, and set-up the video, a 3D animation studio to scan and bring everything to life in animation form, a famous Malaysian rapper and his DJ partner (Asyraf Nasir & MKNK), and us the agency. Everything from the music, set design, 3D universe, etc was written and created from scratch.

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Creating Maya (CAMPAIGN)

Creating Maya as a campaign was a tricky thing as we had to make it as seamless, legitimate, and attractive as possible.

To start we took over a PUMA-owned Instagram account that had not been used for years and completely repurposed it. We renamed it to @mayaaa.gram and posted a deceptive post that had nothing but a loading computer screen. Week by week we posted something new each time filing in more and more holes to the story and bringing her more and more to life. Campaign wise this was to showcase the narrative that Maya was an artificial intelligence that was booting up to come to the life.

By the third week, we finally posted a caption explaining that Maya had partnered with PUMA and together they were looking for the next Southeast Asian PUMA brand ambassador. With this thousands of entries of headshots were submitted. Slowly we then revealed that we were collating all our submissions to create Southeast Asia and the world's first crowdsourced Virtual Influencer. Following that we posted several progression postings to create hype and anticipation for the reveal of Maya to the world.

Additionally, on Instagram Stories we posted several "database uploads" and participant entries to continue the campaign narrative that Maya was still in her adolescent stage and learning what it meant to be a true Southeast Asian.

Finally, when the suspense was at a high we revealed Maya to the world and explained once again that she was created through a collation of all Southeast Asians and that she would stand to bring pride to the "not talked about much" region of Southeast Asia. Maya was born!

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CREATING MAYA (TECHNICAL)

To create Maya while also trying make her thematic origins as natural and believable as possible, took anticipating and predicting the direction of what would happen between each step of the campaign by multiple steps.

Firstly we enlisted in a social A.I. agency to help with the production of Maya's face. They helped define the audience that we should be targeting and influencers that we should enlist in the collation of Maya's face and body.

With the entries collated we then sent them to a 3D production house that helped merge all the faces to form Maya's. Along with the faces of our participants, we gathered an additional few hundred thousand more from Google's database to ensure that we kept with the campaign message of making Maya the truest representation of Southeast Asia. This process had to be done simultaneously with the actual campaign as we were getting many entries in Maya's creation daily. After a while, we had noticed a trend and that made us more efficient as we could predict her face shape and skin tone in advance.

For Maya's body, we enlisted in a photography studio and hired a model with the closest body shape and size that we had rendered from our database to pose for photos in which we would render Maya's face onto. This was a more efficient method that would ultimately save us time and money without sacrificing the authenticity of the campaign story.

Finally, as the base of the face was finally rendered and the poses were taken we as an agency had to ensure that she looked like "real" as possible. Through the DI process, we added the depths and shadows to her face while also blending her face onto the model's body seamlessly. It was now time to show her off to the world!

THE CAMPAIGN

When we sought out to create Maya, we knew this wouldn't be an ordinary advertising campaign. Firstly we didn't just want her to only "survive" within the timeframe of our campaign, we knew we were setting out to birth a person that would live for all of PUMA's future and more. Therefore we had to craft a virtual influencer so real our audience would subscribe to a suspension of disbelief. To do this we had to really dive deep in understanding the nuances of influencers. From what they do to how they interact with their followers, we made Maya do the same thing but with her own identity.

Additionally, we couldn't forget that we also had a shoe to sell and that made the task of making Maya a believable person much more complicated. We had to basically always think ahead and predict trends as we had to plan a person's life in the most natural way possible. To achieve both tasks we made the Future Rider campaign run through her. All our creatives had to achieve both targets so from collaborating with other big-time influencers, to make the shoe the hero in the thematic video, to making her pose with the shoe on her ootd/kotd pictures, to put her on billboards with her wearing the shoes, to writing a song for her about the shoes, to even running mini-campaigns with her to promote the shoe, we ensured that both were accomplished while reinventing the way of making a shoe campaign.