To unpack the immense challenges of the race to exascale and create awareness around it, we took experts out of the lab and placed them in front of the camera to explain the real-world impact of their work and HPE’s critical role to help the U.S. win it — turning highly technical, incredibly dense material into a common language we all could share. The visuals needed to be inspiring, but unambiguous; the voiceovers colloquial, while still technical. We knew this couldn’t be the classic subject matter expert talking head video. It required real ambition and gravitas to pay off the gravity of the stakes.

Anchored by a bespoke landing page experience to launch the nearly seven-minute film, we created supporting social cutdowns to succinctly tell the story that were also housed in a variety of custom ad units. We tailored and amplified those cuts, driving back to the landing page and deeper into HPE’s related topic pages on their dot com, using first and third-party data sources to target the most relevant users.

“Eighteen Zeros” reached a very precise audience. The primary audience was ITDMs, BDMs, and politically-minded people; in a secondary flight, new social cutdowns were created for science and news consumers driving to the full experience. Through targeting and strength of content, we were able to accomplish both a connection with our audience and generally place HPE ahead of the exascale conversation.

• 3.1MM video views of the original film

• 55% of film watched by average viewer of the nearly seven-minute video

• Over 17,000 social actions

• Over 912 cumulative hours spent watching the video during the first flight; a publisher record