Project
AVEVA Generation I
Client
AVEVA
Service
Brand Campaign / Creative Direction
The situation
AVEVA was making serious investments in AI — but the market had no language for what industrial AI actually meant. I led the development of Generation i: a global campaign built to name and own a new category, Industrial Intelligence, and position AVEVA as its undisputed leader. In its first six weeks: 10 million clicks, a CTR 1.8x the industry benchmark, and an 80% video completion rate.
The situation
AVEVA is one of the world's leading industrial software companies — serving customers across energy, manufacturing, infrastructure, and resources. By the time this campaign came together, AVEVA was investing heavily in AI capabilities. The technology was real, the roadmap was ambitious, and the competitive pressure was intensifying. But the market had a problem: there was no language for what industrial AI actually was, what it did, or why it was different from the AI flooding every other software category. Without a category, there's no leadership position. Without a name, there's no story. And without a story, the investment in the technology doesn't translate to the market.
The Friction
This wasn't a campaign brief. It was a category creation brief in disguise. The surface ask was to raise awareness of AVEVA's AI capabilities. But the deeper challenge was more fundamental — how do you talk about something the market hasn't named yet? The industrial sector is skeptical by nature. It moves slowly, buys deliberately, and doesn't respond to hype. A campaign that led with "AI" like every other enterprise software company would disappear into the noise. The work had to do something harder: give industrial leaders a new way to think about AI that felt true to their world, their language, and their scale of operation.
The Approach
We started with a strategic problem, not a creative brief. AVEVA was investing heavily in AI, but the market had no language for what industrial AI actually was. Without a category, there's no leadership position. Without a name, there's no claim. Working with our in-house team and external agency of record, I led the thinking that found the answer: Industrial Intelligence. Not AI for the sake of AI, but the specific, earned intelligence that comes from combining decades of industrial data with the processing power to act on it in real time. The name gave the category precision. The name gave AVEVA a claim. From that strategic foundation we built Generation i — a global brand campaign designed to own the category across CTV, online video, paid digital, and social. The creative system was built to work as a cohesive market entry, not a collection of executions. Every channel, every format, every message pulling in the same direction.
The Outcome
In its first six weeks, Generation i delivered results that validated both the idea and the execution. 10 million clicks. A click-through rate of 0.25% — 1.8 times the industry benchmark. An 80% video completion rate, in a category where most people skip.| Those numbers matter. But what they actually tell you is that industrial buyers — notoriously hard to reach, slow to engage — stopped what they were doing and paid attention. The category had a name. AVEVA had a claim. And the market was listening.
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