Adobe ethos can be summarized with “creativity for all” That is why Adobe takes part in collaborations with artists from different disciplines and makes their tools available to everybody. This time, Adobe wanted to expand the approach from professional to aspiring hobbyists & 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 exciting idea – but also low barrier enough for a community of next gen creators to start creating great work with those new tools right away.

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 digitized David’s brushes and outfits, turning them into an extensive tool pack in Photoshop and Substance.

We also recreated David’s dressing room as an immersive 3D gaming experience: A place to deep dive into the process that created Ziggy, meticulously modeled after Bowie’s documentation provided by the Bowie Estate.

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.

To be social relevant today and stay true to it’s core users while widening Adobe’s audience towards the next generation, we had to partner with a cross-sectional artist: someone relevant enough to be respected by professionals and famous enough to be influential to everybody else.

To find the cultural tension, Adobe commissioned a study on self-expression amongst 18-25 years-old. We found out that +50% don’t like to expose their true personality, with some being more self-expressive online as opposed to offline. 34% feel more comfortable when taking on a persona or online alter ego.

Also, 2/3 have been positively influenced by a public figure, with David Bowie featuring in the top 20 list. For half of Gen Z, people like him inspired them to be more creative.

Bowie transformative power of creativity, represented by his use of personas became, then, Adobe’s choice to tap into the issue with authenticity.

To bring you into David Bowie’s personal universe, we started with a reference photo of Bowie in his dressing room, transforming himself into Ziggy Stardust. We stayed as true as possible to the atmosphere of the photo to give you the feeling that you’re actually stepping back in time to 1972. We used a combination of 3D-modeled assets and 2D images projected onto a simplified mesh. By using this hybrid approach and adjusting the lighting, textures, atmospheric effects and depth of field, we were able to achieve that photographic aesthetic while allowing you to move around in the room.

The gameplay involves you sneaking into Bowie’s dressing room to find nine objects of significance. Each of the hidden objects can be downloaded as assets into the Adobe environment. Partway through the treasure hunt, we introduce a time limit to put you under pressure. The end result was an immersive experience that transported users back in time to David Bowie’s dressing room circa 1972.

Bowie’s tools were placed in the hands of 29M Adobe Users and more than 10K personas where 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.