Revving up for the future

After being labeled a worthy Tesla challenger, Faraday Future needed to back up its disruptive promise with a vehicle launch and company roadmap that immediately generated pre-orders and proved just how close there are to delivering the future. But how do you defy the ever-skeptical early adopters and wow the public with your worth, when the promise of The Future by many others has been foiled time and time again?

Faraday Future is revolutionizing mobility. Unfettered by the constraints of legacy carmakers or the gasoline-powered engine, they sought to build a new world of highly connected, autonomous electric vehicles. But, promises of the future and how mobility will be redefined can no longer be just exciting concepts. It requires hard proof that it is real – thus, the FF.com experience must already feel like the vehicle has arrived.

Faraday Future don’t think of themselves as a car company. They are an extreme technology company, using technology to tackle mobility, while breaking every single mold along the way. This kind of ambition leads to standards of revolutionary heights, and at Amp, we had to live up to them.

A fully embedded team approach was constructed to tackle the seamlessness in communication required from vehicle design, engineering, data sciences, marketing and sales. Once in place, digital development was able to move at a blistering pace without being bottlenecked by conventional client / agency constraints.

Launching a new luxury brand powered by advanced, futuristic technology is uncommon territory. Our first assignment dug into the insights and nuances of what makes a FF customer. What do they believe? What do they value? Who do they influence? This laid the groundwork for how we go to market and define a resonating voice and tone within the content.

Because FF wanted to be an expression of the future and of extreme technology, anything that looked or felt like a traditional car brand was to be avoided. This meant we had to develop a new visual language that felt futuristic, premium, sophisticated and technologically advanced. To change the perception of mobility we started with our product, and then mirrored the technology and innovation from the inside out in order to drive interest and motivate action.

Faraday Future is designing autonomous electric vehicles for a hyper connected world. One where the seamlessness of man and machine reaches exciting and previously unimagined possibilities. The FF interfaces you are interacting with lives equally inside the vehicle as well as outside, online and in mobile. Therefore, to truly achieve a new level of digital experience – to feel as if you are already interacting with the FF operating system on the website – we first joined forces with the FF Digital Product team to collaborate on the in-vehicle UI and design system.

The idea was for the in-car UI, website and every other brand extension to feel like it came from the same place, even though they served different functions. That meant that the website interface was pulling from the same style guide as the interface team. Working with Richard Kim, FF’s VP of Design, visuals developed for the website would weave their way back into the car interface and marketing materials. Everything we did was about providing a coherent and cohesive brand voice. One look. One brand. All touchpoints.

Our creative concept for FF.com centered around a new perspective – one not constrained by what we’ve been trained to see in our world – but one defined by how this new type of vehicle sees our world. With breakthroughs in fully autonomous driving technology and computer vision – the FF.com site style was inspired by the particle-based style (Lidar) visualizations that defines how FF vehicles see our surroundings in real-time.

To bring this to life, we built a particle engine that summons tiny dots of light to create a canvas. We hinted at landscapes and environments, as opposed to just foreign technology in a nebulous space. We wanted something advanced, but familiar. Something that seemed to be created by the person navigating the site and the world, unlike anything they’d ever seen before. Just like their vehicles.

A mobile first approach allowed us to tackle the steepest challenges creatively – how to make mobile even more impressive than desktop. WebGL was used seamlessly across desktop, tablet and mobile to create a real-time 3D environment for the site vs. the commonplace, flat “brochure” site that has become the norm for brands both big and small.

What made this special was that it’s not a streaming video; it’s interactive, real-time 3D, no fixed cameras. Once the asset is loaded, we show you every angle without incurring any new file size, creating a living, breathing world that you explore.

The creative cohesion expectations are anchored in a deep set of business and technical requirements given the evergreen nature of the FF digital ecosystem. The Amp development team architected and integrated a unique Single-Sign-On (SSO) system that works across both vehicle and web. A specialized system for getting content across multiple regions in an efficient manner on a brand new server Platform as a Service (PaaS) was developed. As an international launch in both the US and China, FF.com required a host of other integrations, ranging from a custom Chinese CRM / web server technology to deep integration of Salesforce and WeChat.

CES 2017 was set to be the highly anticipated reveal of FF’s first production vehicle, the FF 91. In the month of December, leading up to CES – we developed a unique, generative countdown experience on FF.com. What began as a swarm of particles at the beginning of December materialized each day into a more defined view of the soon to be revealed vehicle. On January 3rd – at a private VIP reveal event in Las Vegas – the livestream had over 180,000 viewers and concluded with the launch of the FF 91 site experience in both US and China – ready for pre-orders.