Tech for good

How AI, targeted data sets and AR drive connection and societal change.

Although we will one day all serve our AI overlords (à la 2001: A Space Odyssey), for now the power of technology can still be used for good, to expand consumer knowledge and improve experiences.

A compelling example of how tech innovation can solve problems in entirely new ways is “The Black Elevation Map,” developed by Performance Art for Black & Abroad, a nicheaudience travel company best known for its international trips. When pandemic lockdowns coincided with a mainstream spotlight on racism, it provided an opportunity for the travelco to carve out a space as a domestic tourism brand and create a way for travellers to show allyship by supporting Black-owned businesses.

“Unwanted Film Festival” by No Fixed Address Gold AI; Silver Engagement in website traffic and a 971% increase in event sales and site merchandise.

For its part, the Canadian Centre for Child Protection wanted to draw attention to the child sexual abuse material (CSAM) that is proliferating online at an alarming rate. In 2021, 85 million suspected pieces of CSAM were found online. In the past year, one film or image was uploaded every two seconds.

They decided to combat that by creating “The Unwanted Film Festival” and generating the amount of buzz that accompanies large film fests. With its provocative tagline “Playing online everywhere,” the idea was to generate awareness and spur change – with no paid media budget. The campaign, created by No Fixed Address, used AI to build an algorithm that generated 85 million “film posters” and translated the titles into the six most common languages spoken around the world. The campaign, launched online with a live immersive experience right alongside the Tribeca Festival in New York City, would be the largest film festival “hiding in plain sight.”

The hard-hitting effort garnered website visits from 166 countries, with over 50 million earned impressions. A petition (accessed through movie “tickets” featuring a QR code that called for action from the world’s governments and largest tech companies) surpassed the signature goal by 92%.

Black & Abroad

“The Black Elevation Map” by Performance Art Gold Design; Gold Diversity; Gold Brand Content; Gold Niche Targeting; Silver Tech; Silver Best Digital Engagement; Silver Digital Brand Experience; Bronze Idea

With various cultural data as its backbone, BlackElevationMap.com features 28,000 businesses and 6,500 cultural markers. The project drew inspiration from W.E.B. Du Bois’s data-driven, hand-drawn maps and Victor Hugo Green’s Green Book, the guide of safe spaces to eat, sleep and refuel –part of a historical trajectory of “counter-mapping” to challenge dominant power structures.

“We took old-school, practical approaches such as Du Bois’s maps and Green’s book and combined them,” says Eric Martin, co-founder and chief creative officer of Black & Abroad. “Who would ever think these classic solutions would be pertinent? You don’t have to reinvent the wheel.”

The result was a 116% rise in brand lift, 45.4 million impressions across paid and earned channels, a 302% increase

Equally difficult was the conversation Walmart wanted to have about the unseen impact of incarceration. With equitable opportunity among the cornerstones of the brand’s mission, it sought to improve the outcomes for children of the two million people who are incarcerated in the U.S. by using literacy as the lever.

“Bedtime Stories,” created by FCB/SIX, connected incarcerated parents and their children through reading. Inmates recorded themselves reading a children’s book, which was then uploaded to the "Bedtime Stories" cloud server. When their children at home hovered the AR-enabled app over each page of the hard copy, image recognition allowed them to hear their parents reading the book.

The campaign launched at the second largest jail in the U.S., the Cook County Department of Corrections, with books curated by the Chicago Public Library. The platform was designed to be scalable to serve the over 3,000 prisons across America, with Walmart’s continued support. By building and reinforcing family bonds, the aim is to help reduce the likelihood of inmates returning to jail after release.