Innovating Engagement: The Story of Adopt‑a‑Desk‑Pet at Adobe Summit 2024
Unleashing Your Inner Pet - How We Brought Adopt-A-Desk-Pet to Life
Everyone has a special place in their heart for a pet, whether it is the one you never got as a kid or the one you currently have. Pets bring joy to their owners, and there is a deep, special connection with them. For Adobe Summit, we set out to give everyone a way to create that special pet to bring home with them from the conference.
In collaboration with our dedicated technologists in our Adobe practice and our Innovation Lab, we created the “Adopt-a-Desk-Pet” experience for Adobe Summit 2024. We set out to craft something exciting, unique, and innovative that illustrated the Adobe Content Supply Chain, engaged with attendees, and thematically aligned with our Adobe expertise. We drew inspiration from our speaking session with Petco, where we were speaking together about delivering personalized experiences to pet parents everywhere. We love giving back to our communities, so we connected with Petco Love, a non-profit with the mission to harness the power of love to make communities and pet families closer, stronger, and healthier, and agreed to make a donation to help advance their mission for every person that came through the booth activation.
In the spirit of hyper-personalization, we leveraged innovative technologies, including generative AI solutions like ChatGPT and DALL·E, to craft an experience specially tailored to each attendee. We also wanted to add some playfulness to the experience, which required cross-functional collaboration between creative, development, and growth teams, which helps replicate how a content supply chain is executed in organizations everywhere.
Adobe’s Content Supply Chain solution focuses on bridging the gaps between creative teams, marketing, and technical teams to accelerate and deliver content at scale. It leverages the Creative Cloud - Photoshop, InDesign, and Frame.io, and allows creatives to work with the tools they love. The solution also leverages Adobe’s Experience Cloud, using Workfront for task management and approval, Adobe Experience Manager Assets to store the images, and Adobe Experience Manager Sites to display the images on live websites.
Explore how we leveraged these different tools to bring your desk pet to life below.
Built on Adobe Experience Manager
The kiosk experience is built on Adobe Experience Manager using our accelerator, Activate for AEM. Activate uses standard best practices, extensible components, and other exclusive features that allow us to create and deploy websites quickly, efficiently, and effectively. Because of Adobe Experience Manager, our team was able to seamlessly create your survey experience and easily apply any desired tweaks throughout the process.
Perfecting Our Prompting Strategies
Those who have played around with Generative AI tools know that input greatly influences output, so intentionality behind prompts is imperative to achieving desired results.
As you complete the quiz, your responses are recorded behind the scenes and help to create a picture of your personality and which pet might be best. This is all in good fun; how much can you tell about a person by their favorite season? We guess certain adjectives that might describe you and build in randomness to ensure that each person gets a different outcome, even with exactly the same response.
To make it more fun, we built in some playful elements using probabilities to influence how silly the pet names are, how true to typical animal colorings we stick to, etc.
Generating Your Desk Pet
With a great prompt ready to go, we package up the whole thing and send it off OpenAI’s ChatGPT via an API to render the text description of the animal including which animal would be the most appropriate given your responses. This particular project utilizes the gpt-3.5-turbo model, which influences both the speed of the response and the type of response that we get.
We also use ChatGPT to create a visual prompt that we use to generate great pet image. Whether you’re using a tool like Adobe Firefly or OpenAI’s DALL·E, a great visual prompt is needed. We ask ChatGPT to return the visual prompt in a JSON format, so we can reformat key details like animal type, size, and attributes into an image prompt with specific visual instructions to make the images consistent across hundreds of printouts.
We asked booth attendees, “What did you think of your desk pet? Did it feel like it would be something your friends and family would say made sense for you, or did it maybe feel a little random?”
Consider the different parts of the solution. There is variability in how we assign adjectives to individuals or assumptions that we made when creating the quiz. There is randomness assigned to each prompt, which can influence the outcome. And sometimes our instructions to ChatGPT include conflicting requests and result in variability in how it responds.
Printing Your Desk Pet Adoption Certificate
In support of our partnership with Petco, we wanted to provide our participants with a tangible desk pet takeaway that could add a bit of playfulness to those long days at the desk! We drew inspiration from a variety of sources — everything from the pets of our own team members and zoo posters to vintage collectible cards and children’s TV shows.
Once a user completes the quiz experience and the image is created, we pass the pet card to Workfront. In a typical content supply chain, this is where editors can add comments, approve or deny, and collaborate on making sure the content is appropriate. Once approved, Workfront sends the data to Zapier via a webhook, which triggers other actions, like sending the certificate to a nearby printer.
