Technology is a great enabler for content creation for Gen Z: Chandrika Jain

It was in July 2023 that Lenovo India had launched a new video series, called ‘Brave New Art’, which explored the convergence of traditional analog art and digital technology. In collaboration with Intel, the series featured renowned artists who use Lenovo Yoga laptops to create immersive and innovative works of art.

Now, Lenovo is back with Season 2 of the branded video series, ‘Brave New Art 2.0’. According to FCB Kinnect, which has conceptualised this series, Season 2 has the singular promise of being ‘braver’, which shines through every aspect – from the diverse art mediums and edgy artists to storytelling, production, and the awe-inspiring final result.

In an exclusive interaction with Adgully, Chandrika Jain, Marketing Director, Lenovo India, elaborates on the objectives of the video series ‘Brave New Art, its alignment with the company’s broader marketing strategy, and insights gleaned from Season 1, engaging with young adults and Gen Z, the unique positioning in the market, and more.

What inspired Lenovo India to launch the ‘Brave New Art’ video series, and what is the main objective behind this initiative?

This is Season 2 of ‘Brave New Art’. So, obviously, it is built on the success of Season 1, but the premise or the objective of why we did it hasn’t changed. I have said this earlier as well, that we are in, what is called, the ‘attention deficit economy’ and we are also part of what we call the creator economy.

And then we have a product like Yoga, which is a perfect fit for this economy. So, when you have about 116 million Gen Z users today, who are constantly creating content, 9 hours of content every day, and who are constantly creating and using and consuming content, one wants to step back and say, how do you appeal to this Gen Z audience? And in a way that is authentic, interesting and genuinely engages the audience, to be able to tell them about the Yoga device and what Yoga can do for them. That’s how ‘Brave New Art’ was born right.

We are only building on that idea to make it even better. Or, if I may say, even braver.

Could you elaborate on the marketing strategies that Lenovo India plans to implement to promote the ‘Brave New Art’ video series, considering the convergence of traditional analog art and digital technology? And what is the media mix employed, agency involved in the making of this series?

Brave New Art is about converging analog or traditional art, as one calls it, with digital technology. From a marketing strategy standpoint, I’ll have to step back and tell you that the audience continues to remain the Gen Z audience for us, or what we call the creator audience loosely.

Yoga is a device that can take inspiration from expression. So, keeping those two in mind, we said, if it’s the Gen Z audience and creators who we want to go after, the entire media mix was social media that we’ve used extensively. We have also used YouTube, which is a medium where all the content has been put out, as well as OTT, which is something that we dabbled with in Season 1.

Season 1 was hugely successful on Hotstar, and we’ve continued that in Season 2 as well, where we have been seeing some great results already. We have reached over 3 million people in Season 2 so far. We have over 40 million views on the content already across different platforms. I would say that it is a fairly successful mix. We worked with FCB Kinnect for Brave New Art Season 2.

Could you share insights into the target audience for the ‘Brave New Art’ campaign?

It is largely the Gen Z audience that we’re going after. So, in terms of age group, it is still slightly broader. I wouldn’t say that the creator audience is very narrow, but the Gen Z audience or the creator audience is who are of interest to us with this campaign and for this product.

In alignment with the ‘Brave Goes Braver’ theme, what are Lenovo’s overarching brand and marketing goals for this year, especially in the context of the video series and its creative concepts?

Brave New Art is a concept developed for Yoga. It is not an overarching concept for Lenovo and Lenovo’s marketing, but it is largely for Yoga, where we want to take Yoga with the creator audience. What we’ve done this time around with the content is that we have brought in things like 3D, AI, and have embedded that with a lot of art forms to we take it to a new space. And of course, in all this, show people what Yoga is capable of.

For example, we have four different artists who’ve been used in the campaign this time. They are Gopika Sukumar, who is a Kalari artist. This is an art form that comes from the South. We merged that with Vinod Hegde, who is a tilt brush artist, and we brought them both together. So, if we were to replace the sword with the tilt brush, what kind of art can come off it and what can we do with that art? That made for an extremely interesting piece of content. We took that further out and made it even braver.

How is this going to influence the marketing content for Lenovo? I think we’ve tasted success. We’ve always known that good content reaches out to the right people in the right way, and we’ve seen that success with Brave New Art, and bringing in these different influencers who have a certain style of content and serving that up to our audience has taught us more. So definitely, this is something that we want to continue doing in various forms and shapes in a way that matches our products and what we want to bring to our audience a lot more.

We brought together Siddhant Gandhi, a digital artist, and Madhav Goli, an AI artist, which is my favourite in this series. The banter between these two artists to create a museum for people 500 years from today, is a really interesting one – what will it look like, what could the culture be 500 years ahead, what would people eat then, how would they dress up, what would the world around us  look like in the future?

It is an extremely interesting piece of work, and definitely got braver. I loved how the content played out.

How do you see the integration of technology and art contributing to Lenovo’s overall brand positioning and identity?

We are a tech company, there is just no other way. Art is one way for us to express ourselves. And technology, I believe, is a great enabler.

So, it is for me to pick up various instances in culture – art being one of them – which helps us make the point of how technology can enable you and democratise you to do what you do, and do it better. This involves enabling things like AR, VR, or bringing up features like OLED or AI and showing people how this can enable what they already do – whether that’s in art or any other form of interest. It becomes easier because this is the best way to show people what technology is capable of doing.