Building this unique experience required a blend of both technical and creative brainpower
Paid Content
Building this unique experience required a blend of both technical and creative brainpower
Paid Content
YEAR WITH UBER
Want to experience Year with Uber for yourself? Access your own customized video on yearwithuber.com.
The new year is a time for celebration, anticipation, and setting goals for the next 365 days.
It’s also a time for reflection. Looking back on how you spent 2017 can cement the year’s experiences in your memory for decades to come. One of the most exciting parts of your year was likely all the places you traveled, whether that involved a trip to a local neighborhood you’d never explored before, or a voyage to an exotic destination abroad.
Year with Uber is an experience that will add a little flair to your end-of-year nostalgia. The tool visualizes rider stats, turning data into fun, personalized music videos.
Below, we take a look at what went into developing the experience.
The creative
When you access your personalized video by logging in with your Uber credentials, custom animations bring your riding history to life via expressive characters and a snappy soundtrack.
“While last year’s campaign packaged rider history in a more straightforward data visualization, this year’s interactive experience features nearly 5,000 possible story combinations, bespoke song and lyrics, and humorously crafted animations representing the vibrancy and life of modern-day Asia-Pacific,” explains Eshan Ponnadurai, marketing director, APAC at Uber.
In the Asia-Pacific region, Uber identified customs and symbols unique to each city to create authentic imagery for the videos. Each character and setting embodies the dynamism of the region, blending classic and modern design elements for a one-of-a-kind visual representation.
The cars, people, and even animals in the videos are all inspired by real examples of regional culture: Tuk Tuks, motor scooters, and palm tree-fringed beach roads, for example. Quirky characters — like coiffed tai tais (wealthy aunties) and moped drivers precariously balancing a pile of chicken cages on their bike while weaving in and out of traffic — will bring a smile to the face of anyone familiar with such scenes. The videos also nod to 2017-specific trends and viral sensations like Salt Bae and fidget spinners.
Bringing this ambitious project to life required a distinct creative approach.
“We drew inspiration from contemporary culture in broad strokes that are universally relatable, while incorporating local nuance,” explains Cyril Louis, creative director of R/GA Singapore, who collaborated with Uber to produce the work.
For the music in the videos, the creative team decided upon an ‘80s-tinged, hip-hop, synth-pop sound for the original compositions. Each track was designed to be mixed and matched with individual data points.
“[This sound] allowed us to create something quirky, cool, and beat-driven that complemented the visual style while being modular,” explains Pim Lai, an associate creative director at R/GA. The songs also had to be constructed in a way that could be easily spliced and paired with matching lyrics.
The Midday Wanderer
The Early Bird
The Explorer
Orchestrating all of the moving pieces of the project was truly a team effort. Music, animation, color, technical considerations, and timelines had to be taken into account. Uber’s regional marketing team worked in tandem with global creative partners like R/GA Singapore, Fuse Adventures in Audio, and Le Cube to turn the vision into reality.
The endeavor was also an exercise in iteration. The creative process required more than 200 scripts before the team landed upon the characters, scenarios, and personalities of Year with Uber’s make-believe universe.
The ultimate goal of the creative direction, says Ponnadurai, was “to remind people of the role Uber plays in their lives and demonstrate how the use of the ridesharing service is a partnership that enables them to move across cities, every day.”
Making Year with Uber a seamless user experience required a lot of behind-the-scenes technical skill and a holistic approach.
Part of the technical side of the project was a sheer numbers game. Ultimately, the tech team identified 5,184 potential combinations of different visuals, instrumentals, and lyrics. These amalgams, when broken up into different qualities and formats, form the basis of 20,000 videos that are the foundation of the year-in-review experience.
This, the team explains, means that each user’s video will likely be unique.
The videos are designed to function across standard browsers as well as in-app browsers, and they incorporate CSS and HTML5 Canvas visual effects and transitions. In addition, the experience is designed to seamlessly work on social apps like Facebook, Twitter, and LINE.
The project involved cross-team collaboration among engineers from R/GA’s global network, spanning Sydney to Sao Paulo and other offices in-between.
“Technical direction, backend APIs, the video generation system, and QA was done in Singapore; HTML5 frontend happened in Sydney and Los Angeles; the data-driven story debugger was built in Shanghai; the internationalization was implemented in the Sao Paulo office; the social sharing logic and the dev ops for the expected millions of users was led by New York; and the data-driven video supers were prototyped in Buenos Aires,” explains the team.
Integrating so many technical elements — and time zones — meant that it was necessary to develop an intuitive integration pipeline. The tech team would periodically send the creatives prototypes of development URLs for testing. The team also relied upon CodePen to build what they call micro-prototypes of some of the project’s visuals.
All in all, building the Year with Uber experience took more than four months. The tech team says that although the project was challenging, seeing the final result made all the effort worthwhile.
“Enabling a much more personalized retrospective is integral to the creative vision behind Year with Uber, and it is what sets our campaign apart this year,” says Ponnadurai. “It’s not only the use of individual statistics that makes each rider’s visualization unique, but also the way these are matched to visuals and lyrics to build the story of how you moved throughout 2017.”
To further speak to users’ individual stories, Uber and R/GA developed rider “archetypes” based on rider history. These included rider profiles such as: The All Star (frequent riders), The Explorer (globe-trotters), The Early Bird (quintessential morning people), The Midday Wanderer (the “get-it-done-before-the-sun-sets” type), The Nightrider (the “life of the party”), The Roadtripper (those who clock serious miles), The Speedy-Go-Moto (motorscooter riders), and The Lux Rider (those who value comfort and top-class service).
“When we integrated the visuals and music, it suddenly brought everything to life,” says Laurent Thevenet, senior technology director at R/GA Singapore.
Want to experience Year with Uber for yourself? Users will be able to access their customized videos on yearwithuber.com.
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Images:
Uber
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