Emerge Interactive

AXE is a consumer brand best known for its ads and products geared towards young men, but in January, parent company Unilever took a new direction by creating its first fragrance for both men and women, AXE Anarchy. Emerge collaborated in a global campaign to promote the new product line, spearheaded by Razorfish (New York) and BBH (London), to create a high-end, custom YouTube channel application. The concept was to create a social-media driven, user-generated graphic novel, created in real-time as actual users interact with the story and suggest how it should develop.

The site shows off a high-end graphic novel created by the expert team at Aspen Comics. Visitors can browse through the story, suggest plot ideas and where they think the graphic novel should go next, vote to choose upcoming characters, interact with each other and much more.

As technical development partner, Emerge delivered the full digital implementation for the graphic novel, including a custom interactive reader, social-media integration, Content Management System, and scalable cloud hosting solution. We built the application using Ruby on Rails, and host it using both Heroku and Amazon EC2 servers with the ability to scale to handle millions of visitors a day.

It has been a great experience delivering the technical foundation for such a groundbreaking, original and extensive campaign. The reception has been excellent, with coverage in publications such as AdWeek, Mashable and MTV. Check it out for yourself before April 30th and see how the graphic novel develops!