Turning now to the world of marketing, there are also high expectations here for the role of AI. Recently, the communications industry specifically and society more generally has been shaken up by news of AI tools that can learn from a vast volume of text data including Chat GTP from Open AI and LaMDA, a large language model from Google. While current levels of precision may leave room for improvement, it is already clear that affiliate advertising and banner advertising will change considerably, with AI causing a revolution through various mechanisms including its impact on the way in which we receive information and its impact on our purchasing behavior.

As our world becomes increasingly digital, this is a good time to introduce a number of examples of high-quality communication that succeeds by encouraging people to revisit dormant memories, skillfully guiding and building the processes of memory and recall. The first of these examples is the Heinz Draw Ketchup campaign, which successfully demonstrated to the public the powerful presence of the Heinz brand in people’s memories.

Heinz is known throughout the world as the quintessential ketchup brand. However, with a large number of other new brands entering the ketchup market, Heinz began worry that consumers would start to see the brand negatively, believing it “old-fashioned”, and feeling less of a personal connection with it. Therefore, Heinz decided to launch a campaign to ensure that the symbolic “Ketchup = Heinz” association was passed down to the next generation of consumers.

This led to the launch in 18 countries of the “Draw Ketchup” campaign. Heinz used various channels to ask for people’s drawings of “ketchup”, spreading the message through websites, face-to-face and online meetings and even by reaching out to schools. Participants only needed paper and drawing utensils to draw, from memory, their own image of a ketchup bottle. The campaign included an incentive, with participants being sent a bottle of ketchup with their own original drawing on the label. While the quality of submitted drawings varied, the campaign entries showed that most people, when encouraged to think of “ketchup” thought of a glass bottle of Heinz ketchup, with many drawing a red bottle with the Heinz logo and the number 57 on the label (apart from the one individual who drew a bottle of mustard!). The campaign successfully demonstrated many people all over the world still believe that “ketchup= Heinz”, holding there to be a natural, instinctive connection between the two.

The various drawings of ketchup submitted for “Draw Ketchup” were then used in a global advertising campaign for Heinz. The best entries were also auctioned off on a digital art website, generating further the conversation. Media across the globe reported on the campaign, resulting in an advertising benefit of 127 times Heinz’s campaign expenses, with Heinz's social engagement leaping up by a factor of 15. The campaign also led to a 10% increase in sales revenue. While Heinz originally were concerned about customers feeling a lack of familiarity with the brand, they also made progress on that metric, producing strong results in terms of customer affection for and loyalty to the brand.

Actions that we repeat in our daily lives become ingrained over many years and laid down in our memories. In the morning we wake up, wash our face, and brush our teeth. We make and enjoy a cup of coffee and eat a slice of toast. For lunch, we may order a hamburger, and pick up a bottle to add ketchup to our side dish of fries. These repeated actions are drilled as memories into our brains. In particular, items we use without thinking when we are very young are recorded unconsciously into our memories principally by means of their visual appearance and feel.

The Heinz campaign cleverly reminded consumers that “people all around the world are using Heinz ketchup, not just me,” creating a sense of group affiliation that encourages people to feel right at home when using Heinz. This means that even if, in the future, rival brands start to gain more traction, consumer’s deeply inscribed memories of Heinz, grounded in long years of repeated use, will continue to produce an unshakable, special affection for and loyalty to the brand. By publicizing the high regard people around the world have for the Heinz brand, the company successfully laid the groundwork for future generations of young people to also feel an affectionate familiarity with their products. The campaign is a wonderful example of work, bringing together both long-standing fans with core memories of the brand and new fans whose association with the brand was initiated through this work.

Heinz succeeded in the campaign by focusing on our everyday memories, but now I would like to turn to a different campaign that made use of our “social memory” in a completely different way.

The campaign we are going to examine is the Kiyan Prince Foundation’s “Long Live the Prince” campaign, which won a Titanium Lion Grand Prix at the Cannes Lions in 2022.

In 2016, 15-year-old Kiyan Prince a footballer on the youth team of Queens Park Rangers, a football (soccer) club based in London, UK, died after he was stabbed with a knife when trying to intervene in a school fight involving his friend. The death of Prince, who was though good enough to one day play for the England national team, attracted a great deal of attention and media coverage, with the incident becoming a symbol of the tragic deaths and injuries caused by juvenile knife crime. Following his death, Prince’s father set up the Kiyan Prince Foundation, which works to keep vulnerable young people away from knife crime and violence.

However, as the foundation was not very large, and not so well known, it ran into difficulties raising funds. Furthermore, as young people did not have any trust in previous campaigns to eradicate knife violence, nor felt those campaigns really spoke to them, a new method of approaching young people was required. The message from Prince’s father, as posted on the foundation’s official channel, is extremely heart-rending, and worth your time to read.

According to the message, Prince’s father felt that if he was able to show in some concrete way the life full of possibilities that his late son should have led, he would be able to help us take a few steps closer to a society without the juvenile stabbings and violence that can erase people’s lives. 15 years after Prince passed away, the foundation launched a new campaign for the eradication of knife crime. The campaign used video footage of Prince playing, and interviews with his teammates and friends, to information on Prince’s height, weight, physique and footballing style, data that was then fed into an AI to create a virtual version of the now grown up Prince. The avatar of Kiyan Prince as an adult signed a virtual contract with Queens Park Rangers and was even included as a player in FIFA’s officially recognized FIFA 21 video game.

Making use of video games, a platform on which the young people spend much time, produced a major impact from the target audience. The campaign led to numerous football-related companies agreeing with and supporting its aims. Adidas supplied the boots for the Kiyan Prince avatar within FIFA 21, and a Kiyan Prince trading card also went on sale to go alongside those of the other players in the game. Prince also appeared in an advertisement for the British sports retailer JD sports fashion, and large number of people were able to see the career of the now 30-year old virtual player.

Within just 24 hours of the campaign starting, the Kiyan Prince Foundation collected three years’ worth of donations, with the number of Google searches for “Kiyan Prince” exceeding the number of searches at the time of the reports of his stabbing. Major British media organizations also reported on the campaign, with coverage in a total of more than 1000 media worldwide. A survey of 500 young people after the campaign showed that 60% of them knew Kiyan Prince’s name, with 74% responding that “if I had a friend who needed help, I would recommend them to contact Kiyan Prince Foundation”, showing the campaign’s success in achieving high degrees of recognition and support. Donations raised by the campaign where are used to fund the Kiyan Prince Foundation’s work to eradicate knife crime and violence among young people.

People’s memories of Kiyan Prince had come to a stop following the tragedy 15 years earlier. However, thanks to the deeply held desire of Prince’s father to ensure that his son’s death was not in vain, a number of different companies became involved to create the alternative story of the Kiyan Prince should have gone on to lead, bringing that narrative to the public. As stated above, technology now allows us to access past memories. However, that is not sufficient for us to create a future. Through this campaign, which presented 30-year-old Kiyan Prince within a new narrative, some people would have been able to revisit their old memories, while others will have created new memories. Rather than focusing solely on the tragedy of a crime, the campaign’s alternative focuses on the possibilities of life succeeded in delivering inspiration for the future to the young people who may otherwise find themselves involved in knife crime and violence, coaching them to step away from crime and rethink.

The imagination to look to the future rather than simply going back over the past has the power to move people. This campaign is a good example of how society can be encouraged to move in a better direction by creating a culture that avoid claustrophobic feelings and instead looks forward.

Let’s take a look at another example of a campaign that uses technology to recall past memories. That campaign is the “Sound of Honda / Ayrton Senna 1989 “ from the Honda Motor Co., Ltd. (hereinafter, Honda)

In 1989, at the qualifying session of the Japanese Formula 1 Grand Prix, Aryton Senna, at the Suzuka Circuit, recorded what was at the time the fastest-ever Formula 1 lap. The time, Formula 1 was particularly popular, and Senna was particularly popular driver. He was well-loved in Japan where he went by the nickname “Supersonic Prince”. His fastest lap, which reflected his pursuit of speed and uncompromising attitude, amazed people around the world. Senna was the Formula One world champion in 1988, 1990 and 1991, but in 1994, one year after Honda withdrew from the competition, he died at the young age of 34 in a crash at the San Marino Grand Prix, which was held in Italy. People over the world mourned his shocking death.

The Sound of Honda / Ayrton Senna 1989 project aimed to bring Senna’s legendary 1989 Suzuka lap back to life. Honda re-created the famous lap by analyzing data from Senna’s car including accelerator position, engine speed, and vehicle speed, to reproduce the sound of the engine and create retrace the path of the car using 3D computer graphic technology. By using light to represent Senna and his car, the campaign completed footage that brought the spirit of Senna back to the track. The completed video was uploaded to the website of Honda’s “Inter Navi” navigation system as well as the company’s official YouTube channel, with Honda also announcing the campaign on social media. While there were no further promotional activities to accompany the video release, word of the video spread worldwide within hours, with major media organizations reporting on its publication. Fans of the driver posted numerous emotional comments about Honda and Ayrton Senna. It was Honda's technology that supported Senna on the racing track.. In 1989, when Senna achieved his record-breaking lap, the data on engine speed, accelerator position and other metrics from his car were recording and analyzed by a telemetry system developed by Honda for their Formula 1 team. That is why Honda were in possession of the lap’s telemetry data. Based on the data, a recording device was placed on a McLaren Honda MP4/5 of the same model that Senna drove at the time and they raced the car around the circuit, recording the sound of the engine with an onboard microphone. Honda also then placed several hundred of speakers and LED lights along the 5.8 km lap of the Suzuka Circuit, before, after darkness fell, playing back the sound on moving the lights in accordance with the telemetry data to recreate “Senna’s drive on that day”.

The aim of the campaign was to advertise Honda’s “Inter Navi” navigation system, which was based on the same telemetry system used to collect the data on Senna’s famous lap. This allowed the company to showcase the quality of its technological expertise to the public, showing them the essence of Honda. However, the use of sound and light to create video footage that left viewers feeling as if Senna had returned to drive on the track encouraged everybody watching to revive their own individual memories of the driver. The project, which managed to take just a single dataset and use it to revive memories of Senna, elicited a major emotional reaction in viewers. As with the “Long Live the Prince” campaign that we saw just a moment ago, it is possible to create emotional moments, stirring people to experience goosebumps through the use of data and technology. It is also worth noting that Honda produced another campaign, “Connecting Lifelines”*1, which also harnessed data to produce an emotional human story, and from this perspective we can say that both campaigns are harnessing the same method.

*1: Connecting lifelines was a campaign that focused on the use of Honda’s Inter Navi system in the aftermath of a 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake. With attempts to deliver relief supplies by road hampered by damage preventing the use of almost all the roads in the Tohoku region, real time mapping of roads that were in a usable state, or had been repaired, was extremely useful for the delivery of supplies to the victims of the disaster. “Connecting Lifelines” not only won the Titanium Lions Grand Prix, which is awarded to the year’s most innovative advertisement, at the 2012 Cannes Lions, it was sparked the entirely new advertising category of “data visualization”, which has now entered the advertising mainstream.