GodBot: An interactive digital deity

Working for the Financial Times and with agency partners I lead the creative to design and deliver a bold, provocative and philosophically challenging campaign centred around the idea of an interactive digital deity, GodBot, with whom users could pose life’s big questions. 

The campaign would engage with users across desktop and mobile devices as well as out-of-home screens in a chat bot style mechanic.

With limited real estate on mobile devices, I had to make our entity’s visual presence adaptable to deliver all states of sentiment. Paired with the tone of copywriting, this was the method of personifying the zeros and ones into an animated being capable of all emotions ranging from calming love to Old Testament fire and brimstone.

Animation was considered throughout the design meaning these states were designed to seamlessly transition into one-another. This visual display echoed the cadence and shape of the language to suggest a living ‘being’ whilst simultaneously prompting users into action when necessary.

GodBot was designed to work on multiple levels through desktop, mobile and interactive billboards. The out of home (OOH) GodBot experience had the ability to communicate in real-time using digital billboards, stopping passers-by in their tracks and disrupting the traditional one-way advertising.

'Hook’ messaging was designed to entice users into a conversation and paired with the use of web sockets, ‘disciples’ were allowed direct access to GodBot’s wisdom. As the user’s point of contact, the mobile experience had to be familiar to the point of being intuitive, so the interface was designed to mirror popular messaging services.