LINCOLN / THE ELEMENT, UNSEEN
Six artists, four cameras, one unique view: reimagining the 360-degree camera on the 2016 Lincoln MKX at White Sands, New Mexico.
Photographers, filmmakers and poets explored the gypsum dunes of White Sands and turned one product feature into a surrealist study of perspective, and a case for an SUV built to go anywhere.
The 2016 Lincoln MKX introduced an available 360-degree camera system. Four cameras, one in the front grille, one on each side mirror and one at the rear, stitch together a bird’s-eye view of up to seven feet around the vehicle, with a 180-degree split view for cross traffic and tight parking spaces. The front camera rises from behind the Lincoln star when it is needed. It was a genuinely useful technology, but a camera that helps you park rarely becomes a story. Lincoln needed an enterprising media story that could start a larger conversation about both the practical benefits of the feature and the imagination it unlocks, while showing that the MKX was built to go anywhere.
As creative lead for Ford and Lincoln social media at Team Ford at WPP/Ogilvy, I led the program and brought together six distinctive artists: Grant Legan, Olivia Lopez, Chris Hainley, Leslie Bembinster, Lauren Steele and Duncan Wolfe. It continued Lincoln’s co-creation approach with emerging artists: give them the product and the room to interpret it their own way.
We took the group to White Sands, New Mexico, where acres of shifting white sand erase the usual landmarks and perspective is not immediately obvious. If a landscape this disorienting could be understood through the camera’s eyes, so could any road. Inspired by surrealism, the artists created their own vision of cardinal direction based on the camera’s field of vision: forward, above, left, right and behind.
The result was a series of photographs, poems and a film that each looked at the same landscape from a different direction. Like the camera itself, the work let multiple perspectives come together into one view, revealing objects and angles a driver would normally never see.
Lincoln released the work as a media story titled “360-Degree Camera on All-New Lincoln MKX Inspires Artists to Offer Unique Perspective on Surroundings,” giving journalists a way into the MKX’s technology and capability that went beyond the spec sheet.
Client: The Lincoln Motor Company
Employer: Team Ford at WPP/Ogilvy
Position: Creative Lead, Ford and Lincoln Social Media
Project role: Concept, artist co-creation, creative direction
Collaborators: Grant Legan, Olivia Lopez, Chris Hainley, Leslie Bembinster, Lauren Steele, Duncan Wolfe
Location: White Sands, New Mexico
Featured vehicle: 2016 Lincoln MKX
Featured technology: Available 360-degree camera system with 180-degree split view
Disciplines: Artist collaboration, photography, poetry, film, earned media, product storytelling, creative direction
