BMW iDrive at Consumer Electronics Show (CES)

As part of CES 2021 in Las Vegas, BMW presented the new operating system BMW iDrive. It was designed to herald a new era in the relationship between man and machine. METZLER : VATER developed the narrative “The intelligent fusion of sensing” for this purpose, which bundles all the capabilities of the system in the interests of the most natural interaction possible – in brief, the system was given a personality. The customers were supposed to get to know “someone”, in the beginning just a little and then increasingly over time. CES marked the starting point of the campaign. An immersive experience had originally been planned in Las Vegas. Visitors were to immerse themselves in a physical space and familiarise themselves intuitively with the BMW iDrive.

Over the course of the project, alternatives were developed, first of all along the lines of a hybrid event and then as a purely digital campaign. The challenge consisted in conveying the topics of perception and interaction in a digital, restricted environment. The rethought approach allowed other people to communicate with the BMW iDrive, including influencers who were interviewed by the artificial intelligence”. All the interviews and episodes were curated on a microsite with other content. The original project was not simply placed on the Internet but as a completely different format with the episodes. No virtual 3D copy, but instead an “online equivalent” conversion and communication of the story. By using the channels of the protagonists, a significantly wider reach was also achieved on social media.