AI Engineering
Pharrell's Lyrics Challenge
We created a bespoke AI experience for Pharrell Williams that asked fans to sing for access, screening for real human participation. The result: a surprise-and-delight moment where select fans who showed up were gifted a free pair of adidas Adistar Jellyfish.
Background
VIRGINIA serves as Pharrell's new creative alias and community platform—a destination where music, fashion, design, and community converge. It's the virtual hub for Pharrell's future creative projects, limited-edition merchandise, and early access collaborations. The AI lyrics challenge is the first large-scale activation in this platform and was designed to be clear and true to Pharrell's vision.
The Challenge
Pharrell wanted true fans, not bots, to be the first to access his latest fashion collab with Adidas: the Adistar Jellyfish sneaker.
Our Approach
To screen for realness, we tested fans to see how much they loved the Black Yacht Rock album and the world Pharrell built around it. So we made them sing for access to the exclusive drop via his new creative hub, VIRGINIA. And (irony alert) we had Google Gemini AI be the judge of their singing ability.
Results
Real fans sang. Real feet snagged sneakers. No bots got through.
The Experience
Fans were instructed to listen to a song off Black Yacht Rock Volume 1: City of Limitless Access and complete a lyric that was randomly cued up for them. Our Gen AI platform, which leveraged Google Gemini, analyzed and identified top participants, who were then surprised with pairs of the exclusive sneakers. space150 designed and built the lyrics challenge as a custom Shopify plugin to seamlessly integrate with his ecommerce platform.
UX/UI Walkthrough
We replaced traditional, off-the-shelf audio-recognition software with a seamless, real-time solution using multimodal AI models capable of accurately judging human performance. The experience was powered entirely by Google Gemini, showcasing a new standard for scalability and real-time creative analysis in digital fan engagement..
