HBO’s Westworld has always taken a critical look at how the innovative technologies of today could impact how we live tomorrow. Season 3 narrative explores data privacy, delivering a storyline that begins with the awe-inspiring but quickly shifts to the chill-inducing. To take fans on this same journey, and foster the conversation about the future implications of hyper-personalization in a data-driven world, HBO introduced Incite, the company at the heart of Season 3’s narrative, with a multi-course, and multi-sensory immersive dinner for over 200 guests, at CES 2020, walking the fine line between spectacle and disturbing as only Westworld can.

Westworld Season 3 reveals the series is set in the year 2058 – a mere 38 years from the season’s premiere. As technology and AI guide daily interactions, tech company Incite predicts and optimizes human destiny using millions of data points. We set out to position Incite as a real company, showing that in many ways the future they will see in Season 3 is not a distant sci-fi fantasy, but instead, a reality.

Incite made its debut as any big-data company would. In November 2019, we infiltrated Wired25 in San Francisco, where Incite showcased its innovative product offerings as the conference’s premiere sponsor. Not knowing Westworld was behind it, attendees were convinced Incite was a real-life groundbreaking new tech startup.

Conversation was continued by bringing Incite to the world’s largest tech conference – the Consumer Electronics Showcase (CES) where thousands convened to tackle the year’s standout topic: data security.

The CES event was approached as both a storytelling and social experiment. While other companies would demonstrate their products on the convention center floor, Incite sought to tout its revolutionary strategy engine to the conference’s thought leader and journalist attendees. Instead of showcasing the fragile state of data privacy, Incite would display its extraordinary computing power through a series of dining experiences, allowing guests to feel that fragility firsthand.

We invited 200 members of the tech elite to attend a series of Keynote dinners where Incite would unveil its vision for the future. Unbeknownst to these guests, their data was the main ingredient. Throughout the multi-course dinner, guests would peek under the glossy veneer of Incite’s promises, coming face-to-face with the ramifications of their own online identities being served back to them through the evening’s cuisine, cocktails, conversations, and everything in between.

By the end of Westworld’s second season, the series departs Westworld park and ventures into a fictionalized world of the near future, where tech and conglomerates guide the daily interactions of humans. To continue the Westworld franchise and tease Season 3’s data narrative, our strategy was two-fold: launch a fictitious company that behaved like a real one, while shocking and winning over tech press and media, generating buzz among core fans in the process.

To accomplish this, we invited the top 1% of CES attendees – influential reporters in the tech and business sphere – to introduce them to Incite. We strategically chose to activate at a time when data privacy was the most prevalent conversation of the week and offered reporters a vision of the data-driven future that was at first enticing and then unsettling, with the goal of it prompting articles and sparking discussion around the globe.

Leading up to CES, we harvested data from guests’ digital footprints, compiling a dossier that allowed diners’ experiences to be customized.

Upon arriving at our 2.5-hour experience, guests questioned every move – including their own. Courses were presented without guests ordering, while seating was coordinated by commonalities, creating the illusion that Incite already knew what they’d prefer to dine on and with whom. Actors, positioned as fellow guests, and Incite “Experience Managers”, discreetly helped drive conversations forward, working from over 600 pages of script. Topics centered on highly intimate details of the guests’ lives: a recent wedding they’d attended, a childhood trip they’d taken, or even a novel they’d planned to write.

The evening culminated in a Keynote presentation from Incite’s Development Co-Chair and a deepdive into one guest’s data profile. In lieu of a bill, guests were left with a reality check: Incite’s bone-chilling prediction of their future.

By activating at a time when data privacy was the standout topic, Westworld did more than insert itself into the cultural conversation: it dominated it. At the world’s largest tech conference filled with the latest gadgets and promises for the future, it was a fake company like Incite that went a step above in showcasing the fragile state of data privacy by allowing guests to feel that fragility firsthand.

Generating over 250MM media impressions and headlines from nearly every major publication, our immersive experience at CES was “one of the most incisive commentaries on our real-world future” (Mashable), leaving CEOs and editors-in-chief feeling exposed – so much so, that many decided to delete their social profiles after the experience. We also opened guests’ eyes to the reality that “a company like Incite isn’t all that fictitious... it’s inevitable” (GeekSpin)

Fears surrounding data privacy aren’t new, yet to exist in today’s world, we make information about ourselves available every day, via our own social feeds, our friends’ channels, and other digital archives. We’re oversharers by nature – showcasing so much of ourselves on the internet without a thought. But if a company, like Incite, could access your data so it can help you choose a particular path in life, would you? This was the behavior we sought to dissect over dinner, while having our guests confront their digital selves on a platter, as they were forced to dine with the consequences of their privacy choices.