Hero Campaign · SPARQ · 2026
Choose Your Automotive AI
Every corner of car culture. One room. Nine days.
- The brief
- Car culture lives in separate rooms: JDM, hypercars, collectors, F1, YouTube and FF fanfare. Bring them all into one hall at the LA Auto Show, and close the loop on the story we'd been telling all year: automotive AI is not the self-driving car.
- My role
- Creative system, voice, copy
01 · The treatment
The category was selling a future without drivers. We built a room full of them — every corner of car culture, side by side — and let the AI be the thing that keeps them behind the wheel.
02 · Copy direction
- Don't talk in capacity. Talk in culture.
- Host, don't sell. Set the table and let the subcultures talk to each other.
- Draw the line once, clearly: automotive AI is not autonomy.
- The point of a creative system is that it knows when to break the box and still sound like itself.
03 · The rewrites
Year OneCut
A 1,200-square-foot booth in the back of West Hall.
Think the side entrance of the hotel lobby.
SEMAKept
We won SEMA Best Tools & Equipment Product 2026.
The room we were warned would reject us gave us its trophy.
Year TwoKept
The center hall: 38,000 square feet, with collection, footprint, and programming built as one experience.
A first in the show's history — every subculture in one room for nine days.
The roll callFinal pick
JDM, hypercars, collectors, F1, YouTube and FF fanfare.
The list is the pitch. Name the rooms and the hall builds itself.
04 · The final product
Every corner of car culture, in one room — and not one of them asking to be driven.
05 · The metric
#1 unaided recall
Highest in the whole LA Auto Show — ahead of legacy OEMs with ten times the headcount · SEMA Best Tools & Equipment Product 2026
One room
Every subculture of the automotive world under one roof. JDM next to the collectors. Racers next to the creators. People who'd never share a parking lot, sharing a hall.
A first for the show
38,000 square feet of center hall, with collection, floor plan, and programming all playing off one another. Never before in the show's history, and never static: nine days that kept changing.
The roll call
JDM, hypercars, collectors, F1, YouTube and FF fanfare — all in one room, all talking about automotive AI.
The line
"Self-driving cars are not our future." Not anti-tech. Anti-automation of the wheel, of identity, of expression. The way you keep, drive, and modify your car is the part worth preserving.
The arc, closed
By the last day, people stopped asking if SPARQ drives the car. They asked what it could tell them about theirs. Automotive AI and self-driving cars were finally two different things.