Eliza McNitt was already a proven winner in the VR community; she just hadn’t received the backing she needed to create something as big as she had ambitioned. Not only did Intel help fund her latest effort by providing her with the latest in VR technology, but we also created this 5-part docu-series to follow her journey through the creative and production process. Telling her story helped further position Intel as a supporter for creators in emerging media, adding to our credibility in the industry.

In this series, we follow visionary Eliza and her team as they create a virtual journey into the cosmos. We lifted the veil from the technical process by showing her team experiment with storytelling and technology to push the boundaries of VR. Each episode focuses on a different stage of the process: storytelling, visual effects, sound design, musical composition, and technology.

Our partnership with Eliza is helping position Intel’s role and commitment to the VR community, and satiates the general curiosity surrounding VR.

Our main KPIs were attitudinal shift and content engagement. Our series proved to be a huge success for Intel by becoming one of our best performing programs - in attitudinal and in lift - in the second half of the 2017. It was also Intel’s first content program featured in the VR section of the New York Times.

We yielded unexpected attitudinal performance and YouTube success - with 33% of viewers completing all five episodes in full, 25% lift in Innovation metric, 27% lift in Breakthrough Tech, 16% lift in More than PCs, and a stellar 2.7 million YouTube views (and counting).

Our YouTube influencer partnership surpassed our average engagement rate for an influencer campaign by 18X on YouTube and 29X on Facebook.

We wanted to leverage our influencer partnership with Eliza by creating this series designed not for platform algorithms, but for a curated VR audience. This allowed the partnership to work harder toward a targeted audience, which include science and tech enthusiasts, space aficionados, filmmakers, cinematographers, and early adopters of VR.

In promoting the episodes over 9-weeks, we modeled a sequential media retargeting strategy across Facebook and YouTube, serving new episodes to those who had engaged with the previous episode in hopes of maximizing exposure to the entire series. This helped alleviate content wearout throughout the campaign. On YouTube, we partnered with other lifestyle and tech influencers who created original content to promote our series.

Our program culminated with an Intel activation at Sundance Film Festival 2018.

In light of the low adoption rate and accessibility of VR as an emerging technology, our mission was to show how Intel is committed to VR as an innovative practice.

Our opportunity came via a partnership with groundbreaking VR filmmaker, Eliza McNitt, on her upcoming project, “SPHERES - Songs of Spacetime.”

The genesis of this partnership began with a VR demo Eliza performed at CES, which prompted Intel’s VR marketing strategist, Lisa Watts, to support Eliza’s ambitious venture to build experiences like SPHERES with just a laptop and a PC.