Crystal(lography) Clear

How we brought the multi-faceted story of DeepMind’s new AI technology to life for their audiences

If you know anything about experimental protein structure determination using techniques like X-ray crystallography, you know how time consuming it is and why DeepMind’s ground-breaking new AI system, AlphaFold, is so revolutionary.

But it’s a lot more likely that you don’t know much, if anything, about this topic. When DeepMind first asked us to help them spread the word about AlphaFold, it took time and care to understand how it worked — and the input of some specialist consultants.

Luckily we’re quite good at understanding complicated products and making these topics fun and accessible for audiences. In fact, it’s something of a speciality of ours.

The solution, in this case, required a specially designed editorial strategy that would break down the subject and tell the story in different ways.

Here’s how we developed our multi-format content campaign, Unfolded.

The challenge

AlphaFold is a huge deal. An AI system that predicts proteins’ crucial 3D structures, it has the capacity to catalyse progress in cutting edge research in countless important scientific fields from vaccine creation to plastic waste reduction to antibiotic resistance. The problem is, as a complex piece of science, it’s not immediately easy to understand the myriad ways it could impact issues that are important to them.

We needed to raise awareness of how important AlphaFold is and help more scientists see how it could help with their research.

• Find the emotional connection

People like people. It’s easier to relate to a person, their journey and their emotions, than it is to something abstract like a theory or a piece of data.

We wanted to amplify a bunch of case studies that demonstrated AlphaFold’s impact on important research, but instead of trying to explain that research in depth, we heroed the scientists that worked on it and let their emotional journey, dealing with breakthroughs and setbacks, take centre stage.

We met with scientists who were passionate about their work and great at talking about it, and we asked them how it felt when AlphaFold solved a problem instantly that they’d been working on for their whole careers, or finally settled a debate that had raged for years. These are stories anyone can get excited about, even if they don’t understand the ins and outs of plastic-digesting enzymes, or paleoproteomics.

Make visuals work for you

The creative wrapper for the Unfolded campaign was super important. We conceived a playful paper origami motif that brought to life AlphaFold’s ability to unfold new discoveries. Seeing a visual representation of what the technology can do made it more vivid and easy to understand.

We brought in 3D whiz Wes Cocx to execute the imagery in his signature style. 3D is inherently quite beguiling and awe inspiring as an art form, and his stunning visuals create a sense of wonder that fits the idea of exploring scientific frontiers.

Wes Cocx visuals created for the Unfolded campaign

• Find the right format for the story

AlphaFold’s impact varied across the stories, leading us to create a three-pronged editorial strategy. Emotional, human stories are best told through video; but twisting, detailed stories can be best told through long reads, where audiences can go at their own pace through the scientific detail, augmented with documentary photography. Interviews, written up as first person shorter pieces, allowed us to easily and quickly add more scientist viewpoints.

• Assemble the right team

Our working model at Flying Object means we have an ace pool of specialist freelancers to call on depending on the needs of a given project.

In this case, we made sure to assemble a creative team who understand the complexities of scientific topics. We brought on a film director and an editorial lead with Master’s degrees in biology and a team of writers and researchers with science backgrounds. We ended up needing to read more than a hundred scientific papers and interviewed scientists all around the world, so these talents definitely came in handy.

A cohesive campaign

Our approach to this project combined clear narrative and compelling visuals, under the umbrella of an editorial strategy designed to appeal to DeepMind’s targeted audiences. We drew on journalistic techniques to help shape the overarching story of AlphaFold that we wanted to communicate.

The campaign expressed the multi-faceted impact of AlphaFold in various entertaining, inspiring and informative ways, driving home the message that this technology is ready to revolutionise science.

If you have an offering you’re struggling to communicate, or a product that’s tricky to explain, bring it on — we have the tools to help you.