AIA Thinkwell + Pledgewell

Humans are generally terrible at articulating our feelings, doubly so in a professional conference setting.  AIA needed a way to entice attendees of their Vitality Summit to engage in conversations about wellbeing in the workplace. The idea was to visualise the wellbeing of attendees in two ways, both designed to drive engagement and start conversations.

The second activation – AIA Pledgewell – used a novel and theatrical implementation of speech to text and natural language processing. Using this technology, the experiential marketing activation saw members speak a health pledge into a microphone, which was then translated into a growing data visualisation. Here, the visual categorisation of pledges sparked conversation around the similarities and differences of attendee’s pledges.

In the initial development of AIA Thinkwell, we needed to prototype and test a range of EEG sensors. Working with biometric sensors in an experiential marketing activation is a balancing act. On one hand, you need to set up the experience – in this case, fitting the headset – on a range of users so that data can be captured accurately. On the other, you need to ensure that this process doesn’t take too long or disrupt the user experience.

For AIA Pledgewell, we used Google Speech-to-Text to convert visitors' spoken pledges to text, capitalising on their neural network powered API. This process would transcribe spoken words captured through a microphone podium. Then, a cloud-based natural language processing pass would determine which of the four categories the visitor’s pledge fell into.

While the usual response to this kind of problem is to create subjective or ‘hand wave’ responses to voice data, such as colour and mood, we knew early on this wouldn’t be an option. AIA Pledgewell was about individual pledges, so we’d need to accurately define each and every pledge. With some testing and iteration, we were able to achieve an acceptable performance rate, while the tone of the digital marketing activation accommodated for the occasional edge case.

Initially scoped for a single event, the AIA Thinkwell and AIA Pledgewell activations proved durable and successful enough that they have been rolled out across the country. The success of these digital marketing activations was not in the electromagnetic data collected, nor the database of individual pledges. Instead, their success came through the fact that both approaches provided a tangible experience which AIA delegates could use to have meaningful conversations with attendees.