IF / Paramount Pictures
Immersive AR and AI Campaign
IF Starts With Imagination
The summer blockbuster IF follows a young girl and her neighbor who have the unique ability to see everyone's imaginary friends—even the ones who are no longer needed.
The film creatively blends live-action and animation, featuring an array of celebrity voices portraying a menagerie of imaginary friends. These characters, ranging from a banana and a glass of ice water to a flower and a friendly big blue monster, represent more than mere playful companions: they are a source of strength and possibility.
Introducing these new characters to audiences was an early priority and our first step in the campaign.
Vibe With Blue
and Blossom Social AR
The initial promotional assets for the film included AR lenses and effects on Snapchat and TikTok featuring Blue and Blossom, the two main imaginary friends (IFs) from the movie.
Skeletal tracking allows us to “rig” 3D models of the films characters so that they mimic users’ movements, creating a playful experience where anyone can dance alongside Blue and Blossom and encouraging the creation of of dances and fun scenes as users expressed their own creativity.
Key influencers were enlisted to share their creations, showcasing the fun and creative potential for their followers. These participation challenges spread awareness and engagement across social platforms as fans everywhere were encouraged to share their best videos with Blue and Blossom.
Skeletal tracking allows us to “rig” 3D models of the film's characters so that they mimic users’ movements, creating a playful experience where anyone can dance alongside Blue and Blossom and encouraging the creation of of dances and fun scenes as users expressed their own creativity.
Key influencers were enlisted to share their creations, showcasing the fun and creative potential for their followers. These participation challenges spread awareness and engagement across social platforms as fans everywhere were encouraged to share their best videos with Blue and Blossom.
Draw Your Own IF AI-powered Website
The Imagination Station—another key campaign component and a milestone AI execution for our team—represented a unique challenge: take a user's drawing and show how it would look in the world of IF.
This site was built around a user-friendly interface, designed like a sketch book seen in the film, intended to encourage participants of all ages to draw their vision of an imaginary friend.
PBM then leveraged a custom AI pipeline to bring audience engagement into a new realm of interactivity. Through a magical process hosted by the film's characters, they saw their drawings digitally transformed into beings who looked at home in the world of the film, providing a unique personalized experience linked directly to the film’s characters.
The AI pipeline was trained on a number of Paramount’s IF characters, and was also designed to transport characters to a New York City neighborhood to match settings in the film. Recognizing the hand-drawn elements and interpreting them in a style that matched the aesthetic of the film ensured that each creation felt like it could belong in the world of IF.
Significantly, the entire pipeline was architected to be fully hosted on the client's own AWS cloud servers, eliminating reliance on specialized, third-party AI hosting providers and providing total control of scaling and costs to meet usage demands for the project.
By providing a means for fans to create something personal and see it come to life, the Imagination Station deepened emotional engagement with the film and made the themes of creativity and imagination not just something to be passively observed, but something to actively participate and engage with.
Treat Your Imagination
We also had the privilege of working with Baskin-Robbins, a major partner of the film, in the launch of their “Buy One, IF One” marketing campaign. To help drive ice cream lovers to stores while cross-promoting the film, we created two Snapchat AR lenses deployed on social media and promoted in stores.
These lenses featured Blue and other key characters from IF while also highlighting the limited-edition flavors introduced specifically through this partnership: Blue's Boardwalk Bash and Blossom's Berry Twirl.
In Baskin-Robbins stores, customers could access these lenses by scanning QR codes on marketing collateral in and around the store, providing the customers entertainment during and after their visit with an engaging, brand-aligned activity.
Photo Booth With Blue SOCIAL AR
In this photobooth style experience, users take a series of selfies with an animated 3D Blue, programmed to make unique facial expressions with each snapshot.
To further highlight the Baskin Robbins partnership, Blue held a custom-modeled 3D ice cream cone of his signature flavor, along with another cup of ice cream for the user.
The end of the experience resolves in a photostrip takeaway of the snapshots—just like a classic real-world photo booth experience—for users to share out with their friends and contacts on Snapchat.
Blue and Friends Social AR
This Baskin-Robbins branded lens similarly utilized the 3D animated model of Blue on the selfie side, but in worldview, the remaining cast of characters magically appeared in the users’ real-world setting via colorfully explosive transitions.
The experience allowed users to place their IFs wherever they pointed their camera, enabling the characters to appear throughout their environment.
Magic Coloring AR Website
In another execution that sought to bring the characters to life while letting users express their creativity, we combined traditional coloring activities and augmented reality to create an interactive and engaging experience for kids and parents to enjoy together.
The film’s featured characters, Blue and Blossom, were featured alongside messaging highlighting Crayola, another film partner.
Special coloring sheets featuring Blue and Blossom were distributed in various settings, including movie theaters, events at Crayola Experience in Orlando, and online via downloadable content.
After coloring their sheets, users watched as their drawings magically came to life in AR, on any mobile phone or tablet. (No app install required—web AR allows users to simply visit the site on their standard browser.)
Fans were also able to take photos or videos of their creations that could be immediately shared to any social platform, providing a memorable takeaway that extended the engagement beyond the activity.
No IFs About It
The campaign successfully leveraged emerging technologies to bring the film's themes of friendship and imagination to life. By using AR and AI, the promotional activities not only introduced the film's characters in a novel fashion, but also elicited deep engagement from audiences as we allowed them to interact creatively with characters they were meeting for the first time.
Between the lenses and effects, the Imagination Station, and the Magic Coloring Activity, millions of organic user-generated impressions were garnered. Hundreds of thousands of users drew their own IFs, and countless hours were spent coloring IFs and seeing them come to life in the weeks leading up to the film’s release.