In November 2015 the German audio brand Sennheiser launched the new Orpheus, the best and most expensive headphones on this planet. Our creative idea was as unique, exclusive and impressive as the product itself, with the aim to create buzz in the community and use the Orpheus as a brandlift for the whole Sennheiser brand: Since most people will never get in touch with these exclusive headphones, we created one Orpheus for everybody – a virtual Orpheus. More precisely: We made users create it on our campaign website. Everyone was invited to contribute an individually built block – an individually shaped sound sculpture – to make the creation of this „new monument to sound“ possible.

We created the WebGL-powered campaign website „reshaping-excellence.com“ and took users on an interactive twelve-week journey in two phases: In phase 1 we asked people on facebook and sennheiser.com to help building the new „monument to sound“ and to contribute their sound sculpture to the growing monument. We started the build-up process by setting the first stone in a big Sennheiser live-event in London with Grammy-awarded artist Imogen Heap, performing her campaign song. In phase 2 – when the monument was completed – we revealed the new Orpheus live and online: We invited artists to live listening sessions, made the virtual Orpheus 360° explorable and released a steadily increasing level of information about the product on our website. Our website combined information, storytelling and game play in a unique way and reached the limits of what is possible in WebGL: we did not only use WebGL for storytelling product communication but also united WebGL and 3D animation as seamless as people only knew it from gaming consoles. Multiplayer realtime live acting parts merging seamlessly into filmed parts and back, the assets used in CGI were as well used as the live-gaming-assets. Since we didn´t want the look of 3D or CGI-images we chose a look that is reminiscent of old paintings and combined it with a modern, minimalistic interactive user interface. We offered elaborated mobile and tablet fallback versions to make sure everyone could take part in the journey and used intelligent graphics-card-checks to recommend the appropriate version for the device used. Our campaign “reshaping excellence” visualized the Orpheus as a lighthouse project for the brand as real and digital product. And reinforced the pioneering spirit and the sound competence of Sennheiser.

More than 1 million users created and placed their sound sculpture and contributed to the new Orpheus. The average time on site was 2 minutes. 30 % of the users shared a sound sculpture with their individual sound ID on facebook. Overall we generated 59.2 million impressions, 13.520.559 impressions on Facebook. And our website was featured and awarded by all the well-known creative website platforms.