Adobe
ADOBE X BOWIE
We partnered with Adobe and Bowie to offer a springboard for Adobe’s community to express themselves.
Explore David Bowie’s dressing room in an immersive gaming experience, and collect treasures for your own persona.
Challenge
INSPIRING THE NEXT GENERATION OF CREATORS
Adobe stands for “creativity for all”, taking part in collaborations with artists from different disciplines and making their tools available to everybody.
This time, they wanted to expand the approach from professional to aspiring hobbyists and next gen artists while maintaining credibility with our core creative Pro audience.
We were asked to find the right superstar to collaborate with – a unique, well known and aspirational character that could enhance the reputation of Adobe; somebody with a backstory and a mission socially relevant today.
And once we have the perfect partnership, we should launch its tools with an idea that was able to inspire the next generation of creators to start doing great with those new tools right away.
Approach
DIGITISING BOWIE’S TREASURES
Besides music, Bowie expressed himself through hair, make-up, and costumes. So to help our community to play with their identity the same way, we digitised David’s brushes and outfits, turning them into an extensive tool pack in Photoshop and Substance.
We recreated David’s dressing room as an immersive 3D experience: A place to deep dive into the process that created Ziggy, meticulously modelled after Bowie’s documentation provided by the Bowie Estate.
Solution
BRINGING THE DRESSING ROOM TO LIFE
To bring the dressing room to life, we worked with Mick Rock’s behind the scenes photograph of Bowie in the year he became Ziggy Stardust 1972.
We created a fully immersive three-dimensional room faithfully modelled after this original photograph. For the interior clickable props, the starting point was an extensive photographic research on Bowie and Ziggy.
In the experience, while Bowie is on stage performing the encore, players can sneak into the backstage to search for items including his famous red platform boots, the Hagstrom guitar, bracelets inspired by the ones that designer Kansai Yamamoto designed for Bowie, or a leopard-print accessory said to be a gift from the actress Cyrinda Foxe. Once these treasures have been identified, they would receive privileged information on the design and importance of the objects for David.
For the downloadable took pack, we partnered with Tina Touli, Thomas Hedger, Kae Neskovic, Tabea Mahern, Kyle T. Webster – influential creators within Adobe Creative community. They contribution was to draw inspiration from the personas, make up, outfits, characters and even songs lyrics and turn them into patterns, brushes and 3D models to be imported into Adobe libraries.
RESULTS
Exceeding Adobe’s expectations
Bowie’s tools were placed in the hands of 29M Adobe Users and more than 10K personas were created. The campaign obtained 60 dedicated earned media articles in media outlets like Vice, Dazed, Page, Wonderland, Newsweek, and many more, and +8M social interactions, exceeding in 3 times Adobe’s expectations. “From David to Ziggy” also drove traffic of more than 1.5M views to Adobe’s website so far. The gaming experience has an average of 4m 39s of engagement time per user, with players coming back more than 6 times to replay the experience. The whole project trended twice on RollingStone.com and David’s wife Iman shared the project with her more than 840 thousand followers.
