What starts with a cardboard box and ends with a Cannes Lion?
New York Times + T Brand VR.
The job was (not) simple: Help the world understand the transportative power of VR by sending one million Google cardboards to home-delivery subscribers, along with a slew of films. Alongside the newsroom’s incredible work, T Brand Studio created a branded film with GE. This meant learning how to make VR, learning how to explain VR to the company (and brands) and building the proverbial plane as we flew it.
The end result? The New York Times won the Grand Prix for its VR app that incorporates stories from the Times as well as efforts from GE and Mini.
The VR Film
Inventors have long looked to nature for inspiration. Leonardo da Vinci and the Wright Brothers, for example, both examined birds to discover the secrets of human flight. Today, scientists and engineers are looking beyond the mere physical forms of nature, however, to higher-level ideas about how biological systems work, evolve and interconnect. A field known as bioinspiration, these discoveries are in turn solving some of technology’s greatest challenges.
T Brand Studio and GE partnered to create a multi-faceted content suite that features our first-ever Virtual Reality film. Combined with a Paid Post, original reporting, illustration, animation and interactive elements, the experience shows how nature inspires GE's digital industrial technology.
See the full Paid Post here.
The Cannes Trailer
It worked. We won!
NYT VR is the recipient of the Grand Prix award for Mobile Lions in the “app as part of a campaign” category.
The Mobile Lions, which celebrate device-driven creativity, are given to those projects that demonstrate performance in portable platforms, where a hand-held or wearable environment is integral to the ideal and enables key aspects of the execution.
With the launch of NYT VR in November 2015, The Times and Google distributed more than 1.3 million Google Cardboard viewers to Times subscribers, bringing virtual reality storytelling to the masses.
The debut NYT VR film, titled “The Displaced,” captured the resilience of three extraordinary children uprooted by war, all through the lens of virtual reality. It was created by The New York Times Magazine, in collaboration with Chris Milk and his virtual reality company Vrse.
NYT VR also launched with two virtual reality films from sponsors GE and MINI. GE’s film, “Nature is Inspiring our Industrial Future,” was shortlisted for Mobile Lions in the “virtual reality experience” category. The film was created by T Brand Studio, The Times’s brand marketing unit, in collaboration with Framestore VR Studio.