When it comes to trust, today’s world is all out of it. Blind belief in advertising died a long while back, with a staggering 88% of millennials saying they ‘sometimes or never trust the media’. As a response to the crisis in institutional trust, brands looked for ways to tap into peer-to-peer communications. And so came the rise of the influencer – people who traded off their ability to be just like you.

Brands everywhere scrambled to hitch their wagons to YouTube’s stars. However, even that trust is dwindling – and fast. 52% of Gen Yers in the US say they trust influencers less than they used to and 61% say they didn’t think brands were transparent about how they use influencers to promote their products online. 

Not surprising that trust in influencers has been broken, considering huge YouTube Stars, such PewDiePie and Logan Paul, falling from grace last year after racial slurs and inappropriate content. And even more innocent infractions have been the cause of angry backlashes more recently, such as the fallout against influencers like Scarlett Dixon, a blogger who found herself at the centre of a social media storm last month. After posting about her morning routine for Listerine, she came under serious attack with one poster commenting “Instagram is a ridiculous lie factory made to make us all feel inadequate.”

So, when Lufthansa came to us with the challenge of creating an influencer campaign that would inspire millennials to travel outside of Europe, we knew we needed a different approach. 

Radical transparency has become the new watchword in influencer marketing. So, we asked ourselves, how radically transparent could a travel campaign get?

The answer came in the form of a portable EEG device, called the Insight from Emotiv – a device which measures activity in the brain. We carefully select influencer CB Saunders, who had a genuine passion for visiting Japan and sent him there – equipped with the headset to record his brain activity every step of the way.

Rather than having to trust his word for how he felt about his trip, we had the hard data to prove it. As Saunders said about the experience, “it’s going to allow me to share my travel experiences in a way that will bring us closer than ever.”

The data gathered showed us which of the places he visited were most exciting, interesting and exciting to his brain. We then used this data to create a stunning visualisation that responded in real-time to the feed from the EEG, which was layered over Saunder’s travel vlog. The resulting film was hosted on a microsite, which also gave uses the chance to tap into their own brain’s activity by identifying which locations are most appealing to their subconscious. 

Since going live on 19th September the film has been watched 164,000 times and has had 3,700 click throughs to the site.

As Saunders himself said “Is that not the future of travel documenting?”

Written by Kim Curran
Creative Director