Anki Vector Launch
Overview
Anki, well-known for its successful Cozmo robot, was about to introduce Vector. This would be a much more advanced, autonomous home robot designed to be a helpful companion. To effectively market Vector's enhanced capabilities, Anki needed compelling visual assets for their promotional efforts, including a Kickstarter campaign aimed at generating excitement and awareness among their target audience.
While Cozmo and Vector shared a similar external design, Vector boasted significant technological advancements internally, such as voice recognition, facial recognition, and independent operation via Wi-Fi connectivity. This similarity in appearance posed a challenge: how to visually communicate Vector's superior features and distinguish it from its predecessor. Additionally, Kickstarter's guidelines mandated the use of actual product imagery and prohibited animations depicting unverified capabilities, which required authentic visual representations and carefully choreographed video behaviors.
Collaborating closely with Anki's team, we delved into understanding Vector's unique personality and technological enhancements.
Recognizing that Vector was envisioned as more than a toy, but rather a friendly autonomous companion, we aimed to capture this essence in our visuals.
The primary objective was to create imagery that not only showcased Vector's playful and helpful nature but also highlighted the substantial internal upgrades distinguishing it from Cozmo. Given Kickstarter's restrictions, we needed to develop a strategy that authentically represented Vector's capabilities without relying on animations or renderings for the campaign.
We explored various concepts to authentically depict Vector's features:
Interactive Scenarios: Capturing Vector engaging in everyday tasks, such as setting timers or providing weather updates, to demonstrate its utility.
Personality Showcases: Highlighting spontaneous, playful behaviors to emphasize Vector's engaging character, similar to observing a pet's quirky actions.
Technical Expositions: Developing animations to illustrate the sophisticated internal components and software capabilities, aimed at tech-savvy audiences outside the Kickstarter platform.
Pre-launch user research revealed that while lifestyle imagery appealed to general consumers, tech enthusiasts desired a deeper understanding of Vector's internal improvements. This insight led us to tailor our visual assets accordingly: authentic photographs and videos for Kickstarter, and detailed animations for other marketing channels to satisfy the curiosity of the tech community.
For the Kickstarter campaign, we produced authentic photographs and videos featuring Vector in various interactive and playful scenarios, which kept to the platform's guidelines. These assets were used for both the kickstarter campaign and the landing page on Anki's website.
To maximize our budget and shoot days we took on an extra challenge: our photo crew and video crew shared the same shoot location at the same time. This required very careful scheduling so that we could record sound while shooting video without forcing the photo team to stop working in another part of the house.
The videos we shot and edited required careful planning and coordination with the Anki engineering team, so that we could capture Vector's authentic behaviors in a limited time frame. The third video, called "Natural Habitat," was a late addition but a very cool way of adding some personality to these Kickstarter videos.
What changed on the inside?
During the planning stages of the video/photo shoot, our user testing revealed that simply showing capabilities alone did not tell the full story. A significant part of Cozmo's fans, and the target audience for Vector, were interested in the technical details.
Since the form factor didn't change we needed to answer the question: "What changed on the inside?" The following animation was added to tell this technology story and was finished at the same time as the rest of the marketing materials.
The Kickstarter campaign was a resounding success, with 8,293 backers pledging $1,877,719—significantly surpassing the initial $500,000 goal.
This achievement not only demonstrated the effectiveness of our visual strategy in communicating Vector's unique value proposition but also positioned it as one of the most funded robotics projects in Kickstarter's history.
The success of the campaign and the quality of the visual assets led to an extended collaboration with Anki on future projects.