As Apliqo was a guest of IBM's booth at the 2023 BARC Big Data & AI event, it was imperative to make sure we could showcase the versatility of our technology.

Considering the key demographic of the event (held in Frankfurt, with an attendance of mainly men between 30 and 50 years old) and me being an avid player of Polyphony Digital's Gran Turismo 7, this seemed like an idea with a lot of potential.

My proposal was, essentially, a high-end telemetry system for GT7. I had read that GT7 has an API that was documented and so we got to work.

Due to the excellent team at Apliqo, we got the prototype to work flawlessly in 8 hours.

We then proceeded to merging the activation between virtual and real by creating a "mascot" called "The Grid" — an obvious pun on another tamed racing driver.

A LinkedIn profile for The Grid was created and ahead of the event "it" started connecting with potential leads that would attend the event.

In order to participate, users would register through a Typeform form (name, phone number, email, and selfie), data was then sent to an XLS file on Dropbox, which was then injected into an IBM Planning Analytics model. Drivers would show up in the Apliqo interface layer (the product we actually wanted to illustrate its flexibility) and as soon as the user pressed the "gas pedal" their time and performance would be shown on our analytics platform.

The activation was successful in the sense that we had an occupancy rate of our simulator of 87% and we were able to collect numerous leads. Furthermore, the setup was flexible enough so that the activation could replicated through different events around the globe with marginal costs.

Another added bonus was to leverage the network of the events and have The Grid featured in their communications.

In this campaign I authored:
- Campaign architecture
- User interfaces for the telemetry system (Adobe XD)
- Helmet design
- Suit design
- Data integration between form data and IBM PA
- Social media management