AOR Creative Director | IBM Cloud | Interactive Experience
This is not a concept. It is a fully functional, narrative-driven experience that shipped on ibm.com, built on live IBM Cloud infrastructure, and designed to do something most enterprise technology marketing never attempts: make the product genuinely compelling to interact with.
The brief was to demonstrate IBM Cloud's managed platform capabilities to an audience with little appetite for traditional product marketing. My answer was to build an escape room. Players wake up as crew members aboard a failing space station, with a countdown clock running and an AI bot named Rob-E guiding them through a series of coded challenges. Every action they take, every system they stabilize, runs on actual IBM Cloud functionality. The product is not being described. It is being used.
The work required operating across disciplines simultaneously: creative direction, narrative design, UX thinking, and enough technical fluency to understand what the platform could actually do and build a story around it. The cinematic visual language, the chat interface, the puzzle mechanics, and the underlying cloud architecture all had to work together as a single coherent experience.
This is the kind of work that sits at the intersection of marketing, product, and storytelling, which is exactly where the most interesting brand opportunities tend to live.
Rob-E, the in-experience AI bot, guides players through the mission in real time. The chat interface was built to feel like a natural conversation while simultaneously teaching users how to navigate IBM Cloud. The countdown timer and pod inventory number visible here are not decorative: they are live elements tied to the experience state.
