Campaign summary
When every B2B brand was talking about the potential of AI to transform customer experience, Nyala Marketing wanted to cut through the noise by actually showing it.
The agency took the bold idea of hosting a dinner where AI, in partnership with a leading sensory chef, designed custom dinners and drinks for each diner based on everything from their physiology to their food memories.
The objective was to create short-term sales growth and improve brand health for NTT DATA (in partnership with AWS), which needed to get leading company C-suite execs to explore the potential of AI for customer experience.
Nyala Marketing needed to position these brands as leading pragmatic innovators in the space, build relationships, and uncover business opportunities. They met the brief by creating a brand experience campaign based around a completely unique AI-powered fine dining experience.
The agency wove the power of AI throughout, from the ‘AI-bot chef’s assistant’ who gathered insight on the guests, to the menu curation, to AI-powered planning for new kitchen processes, to the projection-mapped table that was a moving work of art.
It was a true success with 100% attendance and £7m in immediate deals, with more still coming in, and transformed C-suite perceptions.
About the brand and client company
NTT DATA, a global IT and business services provider, helps clients transform their businesses through consulting, industry solutions, business process services, digital & IT modernisation, and managed services, with a focus on innovation and global reach.
Their heritage is in Japanese telecommunications (they are part of the NTT Group), and they are a distinctive player in the UK market, due to their genuine commitment to innovation. The NTT Group invests $3.6b per year into R&D, and they have a pragmatic approach to transformation.
NTT DATA’s clients are leading global businesses undergoing technology transformation. They work with client personas across the spectrum, from providing strategic advisory services to CEOs, CIOs, and CDOs, through to delivering IT services with Heads of IT, Network, Architecture, Software Engineering, and many more. Their client base is truly cross-sector, multi-level, and global. For this campaign, the focus was on the C-suite and the cutting-edge area of AI transformation.
Strategic context and business challenge
NTT DATA are true innovators in the IT space. But prospects don’t perceive this. They are also pragmatic ‘doers’ who deliver end-to-end. But prospects can’t see this. How can they show, rather than tell, what it’s like to work with them?
C-suite executives of top companies are busy people. They are constantly invited to big-budget events from better-known competitors like Deloitte, Accenture, Bain, and Capgemini.
They’re also big thinkers and big earners. Why should they spend their evening listening to our clients? AI is everywhere and has saturated B2B comms.
Executives are bored of it. Everything brands talk about is either so futuristic that it’s unrealistic or so specific that it’s mundane and not inspirational. It’s also seen as undermining creativity and taking jobs.
How can we make them excited about it? We offered guests a first-hand experience of something that would have been inconceivable before the dawn of GenAI. This enticed them to a face-to-face event, sparked creative joy, and fostered real commercial conversations about the potential of AI for their business.
It raised the question: “If NTT DATA and AWS can transform the most experience-based industry imaginable (fine dining) for one night, what can they do for my business?” By augmenting the best AI with a bold idea and a creative culinary mind, the campaign made something totally new: demonstrating that AI can feed human creativity, not replace it.
Objectives and strategy
The aim of this campaign was twofold:
- Generate pipeline with a small number of very high-potential accounts.
- Foster perceptions of NTT DATA as an innovative brand.
These were to be measured through the following metrics:
- Immediate new deals.
- Marketing-influenced pipeline.
- Event attendance.
- Spontaneous self-reported perceptions of innovation from attendees.
Overall ROI Success was defined as:
- £1m in new deals.
- £10m in influenced pipeline.
- 70% event attendance.
- 2 spontaneous comments from attendees that NTT DATA were innovative.
- 100x ROI
Target audience and customer insight
The target audience was global C-suite executives (CEO, CDIO, CIOs) from the world’s top companies. AI for CX is a top topic for execs- specifically AI for personalisation. They currently struggle with:
- Moving from proof of concept to embedded business applications.
- Putting together the right team of partners to deliver value.
- Managing the negative perception of AI as a destroyer of jobs and creativity.
C-suite execs are extremely time-poor, experience-rich, and don’t lack opportunities to network. They can go to any restaurant and meet with any peer they want. They’ll only attend events that offer something truly valuable that appeals to them as business leaders and humans.
Their strategy was to offer them a real-world experience that was unique, could only be done by the brand, and showed the potential of AI. It would directly demonstrate what’s possible by the right team of specialists working together and prove how AI can augment – not replace – people to deliver something new.
Customer insight: The entire event was based around a personalised experience, so Nyala Marketing collated extremely granular insight on each guest. Invitations drew on the knowledge of the relevant account teams to personalise the copy on a 1-2-1 basis.
Once the invitations had been accepted, they deployed a bespoke ‘AI Assistant Chef bot’ to have a conversation with the attendees and record information on: Physiologically-based taste preferences, positive food memories, colour preferences, cultural inspirations, and dietary requirements.
This information was then used by the AI model, in partnership with a leading chef, to create menus that were completely bespoke to each attendee.
Messaging and creative
Most people are using AI just to speed up production and reduce costs. In this work, AI is much, much more…it’s the product, the central idea, the initial engagement, the hook, the data capture method, the execution, the theatre, and the factual content created post-event. Here, it is used to expand the perception of the potential for AI to enhance any human experience.
Here, they get a literal taste of what it can do when augmenting humanity. The original purpose was a typical C-Suite corporate dining event, but the solution was an experience that bombarded all 5 senses – and generated massive ROI, new business, word of mouth, and improved the brand perception for innovation.
The agency wove the ideas of bringing together the right experts, augmenting human and AI, and radical personalised experience through everything. Invitations linked to a custom-made ‘AI Assistant Chef bot’ who talked with guests about food experience and learnt about their food-related physiology, interests, and formative food memories, as part of a personal digital journey.
They used the data with AI and a leading sensory chef to create wholly bespoke multi-course menus and drinks for each guest. All comms were built on the idea. On the night, everything was personalised and multi-sensory with strong adherence to the concept.
From a sensory experience room, to changing projection-mapped videos on the table, to talks that explored how AI had not only helped creatively to design the menus, but also helped to transform century-old kitchen processes to deliver a previously impossibly complex evening. It was a bold, rich, seamless execution – guests revelled in it.
Media and channels used
This campaign was predominantly based on an in-person experiential event. Due to the very tight targeting and seniority of the audience, all communications were 1-to-1. They created a comprehensive content plan to ensure the audience received engaging on-brand communications pre, during, and post-event.
Pre-event emails were carefully written to intrigue, inform, and encourage attendance, and then were personalised and delivered by known account partners to add to the personalized experience. They developed a custom microsite with animation and a chatbot (the ‘AI assistant chef-bot’) to personify the generative AI that was at the heart of the event.
This was a key digital touchpoint for the audience, creating a bridge between the digital invitations and the in-person experiential event. Following the event, they provided attendees with the customised menus as high-quality printed assets to provide a practical memento of the evening and to act as a reminder of their key messages.
Key martech platforms and solutions
This event was entirely based on the bold and novel use of generative AI to create previously unimaginable experiences. As such, there was no existing ‘off the shelf’ martech that could deliver it. They developed two bespoke pieces of tech for this campaign alone.
The first was the chef-bot that spoke with the attendees to learn about their preferences was a custom-made landing page based around the ‘Tripetto’ conversational survey tool. The second was to work with the partner brand, AWS, to use their Bedrock Titan LLM in a completely novel way, as a customised menu creation tool with the capabilities to:
- Suggest menu concepts.
- Create custom menus (including ingredient lists and recipes).
- Find synergies across menus (such as the reuse of use of ingredients and processes).
- Provide consultancy to a professional kitchen on how to revise existing processes to deliver a more complex, novel dinner.
Timescales
- Phase 1 – Strategy/Conceptual development: (October 2024 – November 2024).
- Phase 2 – Management/Event planning/Production/Creative: (November 2024- February 2024).
- Event date – 6th February 2025.
Results
- 1,012x real-world ROI (against a target of 100x).
- 100% attendance (against a target of 70%).
- Outstanding feedback from every attendee.
- Spontaneously reported an increase in perception of innovation from every attendee.
The campaign was lauded by the client’s Global leadership team and is now being rolled out globally. One CEO of a leading telco was so intrigued by the concept that he flew from New York to London at his own expense just to attend.
Testimonials
“Really grateful for the above and beyond work from Nyala, as well as the commitment to campaign success in creating this for us. We have achieved over 1000% ROI”. -Lizelle Pillay, Senior Specialist, NTT DATA
“Very impressive event and executed brilliantly. I want to make it an event in a box for all regions and countries to try and duplicate” -Mona Charif, CMO, NTT DATA
