Autonomous Intelligent Driving (AID) is Audi’s centralised unit for the creation of software that will enable Autonomous Driving. Alchemy was assigned to re-create their brand identity and develop recruitment advertising that would attract the right people within the industry. The challenge was to break AID free from how the category normally communicates and to find a market opportunity for positioning that could also guide them in decision making amongst leadership and staff.
Research taught us the current Autonomous Driving (AD) narrative is obsessed with a fantastical vision of the future that is dominated by robots and AI. Human beings have been completely removed. Yet ‘humans’ are absolutely essential for this technology to take off. We decided that true to the original Volkswagen belief, AD has to work for everyone, not just a privileged elite. So in order to attract talent and customers, we positioned AID as the more human autonomous company with the vision to create a human-centred, not technology centred, Autonomous Driving future.
The world we envision for AID is not about autonomous vehicles. Instead, it’s about autonomous people. So the new brand identity had to bring human irrationality and warmth to the digital world. Inspired by a child’s building blocks, the logo design is sharp and dynamic but retains some of the warmth and playfulness. The human-first positioning meant flipping the script on how the category normally communicates - so recruitment campaign ‘Help us teach cars about people’, was focused on humans, with the cars as the supporting cast.
