How I Turned Slides into a Show: My Submission to Texas Immersive

When I first heard about this fairy tale of a program at UT exploring the frontiers of storytelling, I knew it was where I belonged. I had to get into Texas Immersive. The only problem was that the application prompt was completely open-ended and challenged me to make something, anything, that immersed users in my story.

VR? Animation? Video game? That’s what the most qualified candidates might make. Except I didn’t know how to make any of that stuff.

But after years as a brand strategist, what I did know was how to write a brief, how to create an engaging slideshow deck, and how to tell a story. So that’s where I started. The Brief:

Target Audience | The candidate selection committee at Texas Immersive

Audience Problem | They’re overwhelmed by the increasing volume of viable candidates

Audience Insight | They want candidates that make the choice easy

Strategy | Make choosing me feel like a no-brainer

Now join me as I walk you through the world of, well, me. And see for yourself if I positioned myself as the easy choice.

Debate Night

You hit present on the slideshow. Go full screen. And the opening sequence pulls you into another world. You’re watching a news report on your old TV set featuring an 80s-style news anchor with fabulous hair. She welcomes you to the Texas Immersive selection process where it’s debate night between two top candidates: one of them being human, the other being AI. Apparently, “some guy named Adrian” is about to go toe-to-toe with ChatGPT* to prove he’s the better candidate.

*Note that ChatGPT was asked to respond in the form of Jerry Seinfeld aka JerryGPT

The old TV set and vintage news anchor ground you in a familiar, perhaps nostalgic setting. Meanwhile, the juxtaposition of old-school imagery and talks of generative intelligence transport you into a completely alternate timeline. And the meta-commentary about the selection process lets you know that you are entering a world that understands you already.

You’re the One Asking the Questions Around Here

The news anchor invites you to the “live” debate and you’re presented with a wall with buttons. This is where the story puts you in total control. Like a choose-your-own-adventure book, you can now select any one of the six questions to ask the candidates.

A Man of the People

Making your selection takes you to the debate room where a moderator is lobbing your questions to the candidates. Let’s say you chose the first one: “How do you study your target audience?”

JerryGPT answers first and maybe you giggle. He says he studies what people write and say. I counter by arguing that I study what people feel.

You begin to learn about my point of view on audience as a self-proclaimed “digital anthropologist.” You watch a short film about some of my audience research — me going around the country doing ethnographies for Nintendo where I helped them unlock the secrets to connecting with the youngest gen-z kids in the digital age.

An Experience About My Experience

You come back to the wall of buttons and choose another question. Like the one about values. There you learn about my time in the United States Air Force. A video shows you the exact operations floor where I used to work, flying the GPS satellites.

You ask about related experience and see some of the impressive companies I’ve been lucky enough to work with. You watch the Beats’ “Do You Love Me” film, a direct reflection of my strategy and positioning work with them in 2020, winning numerous awards and helping the brand rebound after years of falling out of touch.

You see the work I did with HBO, where I helped them create a space to connect with multicultural audiences. You’re taken to the HBO Pa’lante Instagram which now boasts over 100k followers.

Let’s Get Deep

If you ask either of the “why” questions, you’ll get to learn more about my goals and point of view on advertising. You see Andrew Essex’s “The End of Advertising” and you immediately know that I’m not one of these ad people who drinks the Kool-Aid. In fact, I not-so-secretly hate the Kool-Aid. I think most advertising is dreadful at best and causes psychological clutter and trauma at worst. You learn that I came to Texas Immersive to train my imagination and develop the mindset required for the new world of storytelling.

You see another book, Sapiens, by Yuval Noah Harari. There, you learn about my philosophy on stories and personal mission statement: to create constructive stories for a more thoughtfully designed world.

The Choice is Yours

At any point, when the choice was clear enough for you, you hit the skip button and end the debate. Your favorite news anchor returns to your television set and leaves you with one final question: “Will the next generative intelligence in your classroom be human or AI?” The TV cuts out and you exit the debate simulation.

Reflection

Now, after only a few weeks into the program, I can reflect back on this experience design and realize how much I’ve learned already. I can assess this project’s success and shortcomings through our mantra about engaging an audience: intention, expectation, interaction, and relation.

I knew my audience’s intentions were to assess my response to the prompt. But I could’ve conducted more research, like finding previous submissions, to determine what they were expecting. I’d like to think my clever hyperlinking made a slideshow feel more open-world (interaction) and that I made the most of the space and technology (relation). But hopefully, those are some of the skills I will bolster through this program.

Most likely, I didn’t make the overall selection process any easier for my audience this year. But hopefully, this experience made them feel that I was an obvious choice.

Now it’s time to make good on my campaign promises.