EY: The Face of the Future

The EY organization (EY) today announces the launch of a new and fully integrated marketing campaign entitled “The Face of the Future.” Through this campaign EY promotes its recently launched unifying artificial intelligence (AI) platform, EY.ai, highlighting the need to put humans at the center of the AI transformation to help deliver on the exponential value the technology provides. Against a backdrop of real-world business, governmental and societal concerns around the adoption of AI, “The Face of the Future” is an assertion of the EY belief that confidence in AI needs to be instilled by prioritizing a people-first approach. This belief is brought to life through the campaign’s central asset, an ever-changing animated face comprising of the images of more than 200 EY people. It highlights the transformative power of AI across organizations when it is people-centric while making provocations around AI adoption, posing the question: How can AI help your organization face the future? The asset was developed with leading AI visual and voice technology typically used in blockbuster movie productions. It embodies the power of EY people in driving positive AI-led transformation and forms the core of an omni-channel campaign intended to engage audiences across TV, out-of-home (OOH) advertising, digital, social media, and other EY properties. To produce “The Face of the Future” the global organization enlisted more than 200 EY people from across the world. Each was photographed to create static images that were then animated against a moving face and speaking to a script using a proprietary AI model. To highlight every individual’s facial architecture, a specially adapted one-shot StyleGAN was created. From there, a single professional voice recording was transformed using voice AI to develop an unlimited number of new voices that matched the film's moving faces precisely. This process yielded an asset that would previously have been near impossible to deliver and saved hundreds of filming and editing hours. EY collaborated with several agencies to produce and execute the content-rich integrated campaign, led by world-leading creative director Graham Fink of FinkDifferent, who conceived the creative direction in collaboration with Mark Goodwin of SquidInk. The campaign was a joint effort with Ogilvy UK and Hogarth Worldwide on content experience, Not Just Any (NJA) for production, The 5Gs for AI tech and EssenceMediacom for media planning. The EY.ai human-centric logo flowing with an animated 'i' was developed with the support of Brandpie.