Insight & Strategy: EltonJohn farewell tour VRexperienceWhy Elton John tapped into virtual reality to engage ayounger generation of fans

March 20, 2018

Rocket Entertainment recently announced Elton John’s retirement tour bycreating a virtual reality experience for public and press viewership.

The activation, created with agency Spinifex, LA, virtually recreated the highlightsof Elton John’s career. It began by showing Elton John as a young man, singing YourSong at his first US concert. The CGI Elton John also reenacted prolificperformances, such as his 1975 concert at Dodgers Stadium in Los Angeles, andaccompanies the viewer into a psychedelic version of outer space.

©2018 Contagious

Once the six-minute film was over, the real Elton John played a few songs on thepiano to an audience in New York and discussed his final tour with journalistAnderson Cooper. The whole experience was also livestreamed directly to peoplewearing VR headsets at two launch events in London and LA. Anyone can nowwatch the film on YouTube, with or without a VR viewer.

The agency also created an augmented reality experience in the lead up to theannouncement. A self-playing piano was set up in London’s King’s Cross Station on21 January, and passers by could use AR to see Elton John playing it. CardboardElton John VR headsets were also handed out at the station ahead of thelivestream.

Results / According to the agency, the campaign received almost 14m YouTubeviews in the first week, had 5,000 hits per second, and resulted in a 2700% increasein web traffic.

We spoke with Ben Casey, CEO at Spinifex, LA, to find out more about the thinkingbehind building this VR experience.

Can you tell us about the client relationship, how long have you worked withRocket Entertainment for?

This was our first project. We had seen an RFP [request for proposal] emergethrough our Australian business about a future opportunity, and based on what we

©2018 Contagious

were looking at and who we knew was involved in that project, we decided to giveRocket Entertainment a call. We had the opportunity to share our thoughts. TheRocket Team were impressed and they asked us to retarget that thinking towards aproject in the immediate future, which was the retirement tour announcement. Wethen went through a process of conception specifically around this.

We invited Rocket Entertainment to come to our studio while they were out in LAfor the Oscars party this time last year [2017]. That’s when we shared our long-range plan and started thinking about some of the possibilities using thetechnologies that we’re working with today, and they were excited.

What was the brief like, you mentioned the retirement tour wasn’t the initialproject?

It was for something Elton had planned for further down the track. There wasnothing wrong with the brief, it was just written to serve today’s audience ratherthan for those in 2020 and beyond. As a result, we re-targeted the brief towards theimmediate future, which was the retirement tour announcement. We then wentthrough a process of conception specifically around this.

We spent two or three weeks working on concepts before we went back to Londonand we had several big ideas relating to the tour announcement. At that time, mostof the thinking was around creating a consistent, global storytelling platform. Wewere looking at planetariums and observation wheels as venues, trying to find theability to release news and create unique storytelling environments that could beconsistent across different cities around the world. We wanted to tell Elton’s storyunusually.

©2018 Contagious

How did the idea for a VR experience emerge?

When we sat down with them [Rocket Entertainment], the main thing we sharedwas what we call our ‘end states’. Whenever we’re using technology, we projectforward as far as we can see and we start talking about what the end state of thattechnology is. In this case, we have the benefit of actually having projects that willdeploy in 2020 and beyond. So we go through a process of projecting forward. Then,if somebody then wants something before that, we connect the dots lookingbackwards.

That’s how we came to VR, because a lot of what we were talking about for curatingElton’s story in exciting ways involved a lot of mixed reality and projection in thinair. So, it became a case of working backwards and realising if they [RocketEntertainment] needed to deliver [the retirement announcement] within the nexteight months, VR was our only option. We wanted to take people back and havethem experience some of Elton’s seminal moments, and there are already so manyrobust options that could work in the live environment. We wanted to take peopleback in time literally, and for it to be a high fidelity immersive experience, VRseemed to be the right tool for the job.

Could you talk to us about the partnership with Google?

We were talking to many companies, and everybody realised how complex thechallenge was, given the limitations of today’s VR technology. It got a littleuncomfortable for most people, from Facebook to Google to Samsung and Intel,

©2018 Contagious

everyone. One of the breakthroughs in the project, during discussions with Google,was when it became clear they were comfortable with the technology, but whatthey weren’t satisfied with was deploying it in a live scenario. When we eventuallygot the opportunity to sit down and go through the details, they recognised that wedo these live experiences every day. It’s like breathing to us.

What are some of the steps you need to take when you are doing a live VRexperience?

The big challenge and probably the hardest is the mass trigger. VR is set up for anindividual user experience, and there are enormous challenges with getting anelegant mass trigger for everyone to use at once. And when you do trigger,everybody has to have an identical experience regarding where they’re facing andwhere the content is appearing in front of them. Also, there’s the networkingrequired to host the mass trigger. Networking is historically the Achilles heel of alive event environment because it’s one thing that becomes somewhatuncontrollable when you start to bring a lot of users into the equation.

If you remember Steve Job’s iconic moment when he told everyone to set theirlaptops down during his demo so that they didn’t break the wifi system in theroom, that’s what you’re dealing with. The technology is designed for individuals ata desk. When you start to multiply that by hundreds, it becomes a challengingenvironment and a clumsy experience to manage. After the event, differentdepartments from Google were saying, ‘So you’re telling us now that we can do a500-person mass VR experience because that’s something we’ve wanted to do for a

©2018 Contagious

while.’ It was done in a very seamless way. It did its job while the focus remainedon Elton and the content.

What were the challenges you faced in the campaign, technically andcreatively?

I think everyone who’s worked with a human subject matter, understands that thatfinal frontier is the replication of the human form. It’s probably the mostchallenging thing in visual effects, let alone doing it in these sorts of formats withtheir inherent challenges. We had a few headstarts though, Elton John is famed forhis eyewear collection and that gave us a unique advantage, because the eyes arewhere the real emotional connection comes in. It’s the hardest part of creating adigital human form because [when it’s not perfect] it makes it a bit obvious. Also,the fact that inherently he’s an individual at the piano. When you look at himcompared to different music acts, it positions him as someone you can have afocused experience with across the piano.

We wanted to demonstrate the accessibility of a process like this. We put a newmachine room in our studio last year for rendering and processing our content. Thereason we did that was because of the complexity of a lot of these immersiveformats. The exponential curve of pixels from HD to 4k to 8k is one thing, but whenyou start to do it across ten cameras facing all directions, it suddenly becomesincredibly intensive.

At one point we were running at 1.2 petaflops, which is the measure of processing

©2018 Contagious

rendering. When the guys were ratcheting up to 95 GPUs [graphics processingunits] and getting the machines primed for the rendering required for this project,one of the exciting discoveries was that the largest supercomputer in the world[IBM’s Roadrunner back in 2009], which rendered Iron Man, was running at 1.1petaflops.

That supercomputer cost $100 million and took up a whole square block of abuilding. In our case, we’ve got the same machinery running more powerfulprocessing in the space of a two-car garage. It illustrates one of the other big armsraces that’s going on in the space of being able to bring these ideas to reality. Whenyou compare it to the IBM Roadrunner, it’s a fantastic achievement. The samepower still exists in our studio in the space of a two-car garage. It was quite a mind-blowing moment.

What was the seeding strategy for the public viewership?

The press typically run tour announcements. They will then write it up, everybodywill discover it, and then word of mouth will spread. But, the press pool started togrow a little bit, and we realised there was a whole army of existing Elton fans thatwe should let into this experience directly. So it wasn’t until quite late in theprocess that we opened it up.

We came up with an activation stunt that we deployed in London three days beforethe press launch. We took over an area in King’s Cross Station with a Disklavierpiano [a self-playing piano] and worked with Elton’s piano partner, Yamaha. We satthe piano in the station playing Your Song, which was Elton’s breakthrough song in1970. We set up viewers [AR screens] for the public, which when the audiencelooked through, saw Elton appear as a young man. The piano was programmed withElton’s actual finger strokes, pressing the keys automatically and then when youadd the AR layer, you effectively see a hologram of Elton John as a 23-year-old wassitting at the piano playing away.

We specifically intended to create content and public awareness. And that went outwith Google’s and YouTube’s support. We put Elton John on the agenda at the startof the week of the tour announcement so there was news that would connect thedot to the live VR event which took place on the Wednesday of that week. We werealso handing out limited edition, branded Elton John VR viewers that would startseeding the hype of the VR experience and generate some press in cross-pollinatedchannels. We wanted to show something was brewing.

©2018 Contagious

We made a concerted effort to target different demographics of fans with the tour.Because, if the only people going to the farewell tour are the core fans, they willultimately age out with Elton. The real focus of this experience and all the projectsthat are set up between now and the next five years is to deliver the concept oflegacy and enable his spark of magic to be picked up by younger generations. We’veseen the engagement rates across the different groups, and it has succeeded ingetting a more youthful audience set that aren’t the usual Elton John fans.

One piece of feedback we saw when we were going through the comments was thatpeople were saying: ‘This is a perfect way for my parents to understand thistechnology.’ We saw kids buying tickets for their parents because they knew that itwas going to be an exciting experience to connect their world with their parents'. Itwas a factor in the way we conceived the project and also a feature of the results ofthe project too.

Why was VR so crucial to this project?

As we started this project, one of the main discussions we had was ‘what if CharlieChaplin hadn’t been in that transition between photography and film, and thepopularity of film, would he have had as big of a cultural impact?’ And I think we’reat another line in history right now, where you see all these technologies,volumetric and light field technology, starting to come out and this massiveexplosion of retinal projection, mixed reality, augmented reality and virtual reality.They all rely on having the data that takes content out of 2D format into thisvolumetric format.

©2018 Contagious

That’s the focus of this project, to recognise this line in history that probably willexist for musicians. The choice is you can either capture your content or it’ll onlylive in a 2D format. We’ve got high fidelity [high-quality reproduction of sound],but it hits a dead end when it comes to translating that kind of data into thesevolumetric formats. A lot of thought went into Elton’s legacy, but the lack of datamight limit his legacy as you look down the track. What we’re doing is hopefullycapturing Elton’s likeness and pairing that with his music in formats that will berelevant 50 to 100 years from now.

What are the future plans for this campaign?

When all is said and done, Elton’s focus is that his music lasts by capturing theinterest of younger audiences at this critical point. Using visual technology helpspeople get one step closer, or at least open the door to Elton John and start goingthrough the wormhole of recognising what an incredible musician he is. That’sreally what this whole product is about. It’s about using one moment in time tospark the interest of an entire new generation of fans. We’ll be able to keep thismusic relevant in the future and in what has been coined as ‘post-biological’ life. Ifthere’s still a way that he can engage and excite and shock audiences, they’ll beinterested in his music.

The way that we’re approaching this process over the next five years is to thinkabout it from the perspective of mind, body and soul. So the body is the process wewent through to generate the 3D asset. The soul comes somewhat through the

©2018 Contagious

motion capture we did of Elton and applied to his body. And the next step is themind and looking at how AI and cognitive computing can potentially play intotaking this one step further.

What is your most significant learning from the campaign?

With great risk comes great reward. It comes down to being as compelling andpersuasive as possible in relation to the point that the idea is at its purest. We’vebeen able to sell and engage with projects that are unprecedented. Ten years ago,we specifically moved our business into the path of branded communicationbecause we felt that we could translate a lot of these techniques and thinking intothe branded environment.

What we’re starting to see now as we come off the back of this project is hugeinterest from brands saying: ‘All right, that was incredible. How do I get some ofthat innovation into our pipeline? How do we do this?’ In a lot of ways, some ofwhat we’ve been doing over the last five years has seemed somewhat abstract to alot of CMO-level folks, and they think it’s a bit of a risk. Now people have seen ause case they come back and say: ‘That was interesting, and that risk paid off.’

©2018 Contagious