Converse

Case Study

Turning a Global Campaign Into an Immersive Experience

For Converse’s In Their Chucks VR, we transformed stories from the larger Made By You campaign into an immersive 360° experience spanning web, mobile, virtual reality, and a physical brand activation.

The experience invited audiences inside the worlds of Converse personalities through interactive 360° films rather than presenting their stories through conventional campaign content. Large stereoscopic and non-stereoscopic video, immersive audio, mobile applications, and Google Cardboard extended the experience across multiple ways of viewing and interacting with the work.

Delivering that idea required close coordination between disciplines that did not normally operate as a single production pipeline. Development, 360° video, live-action production, mobile applications, QA, infrastructure, and experiential launch requirements all had to come together as one cohesive digital experience.

Digital Delivery Across Creative & Technical Teams

My role extended across the delivery lifecycle. I coordinated developers, participated in stakeholder meetings, worked with the 360° and live-action production teams, supported app delivery, coordinated QA and testing, prepared the production environment, and helped move the complete experience toward launch.

That meant working across the boundaries between creative production and technology. Decisions made during the immersive-video process affected application behavior and delivery requirements, while decisions within development and infrastructure affected how extremely large media assets could be served reliably to audiences.

Rather than treating those disciplines as separate workstreams, my responsibility was helping connect them into a deliverable experience. The work required understanding what the creative team wanted audiences to experience, what developers and applications required technically, what needed to be validated through QA, and what the production platform needed in order to support the final product.

Delivering 360° Across Web, Mobile & VR

The experience extended beyond a single website, with companion applications supporting iOS, Android, and Google Cardboard and giving audiences multiple ways to enter the 360° films.

At the time, consumer 360° and VR experiences presented significant delivery challenges. Large stereoscopic and non-stereoscopic video files had to remain visually compelling while still being practical to distribute, and the experience needed to work across different devices, viewing modes, and application environments.

I worked with the development and immersive-production teams as those pieces came together, coordinating delivery and helping ensure the applications and web experience were tested against the media and interaction requirements of the project.

QA was particularly important because this was not a conventional responsive website with one predictable interaction model. Different hardware, mobile platforms, media formats, viewing modes, and immersive behaviors created additional points of failure that had to be evaluated before launch.

From 360° Production to Audience Experience

Working with the 360° and live-action teams also required bridging production and digital delivery. The immersive footage was not simply content placed inside a finished interface. Its format, size, presentation, and behavior directly affected the applications and infrastructure responsible for delivering it.

That made coordination throughout production important. Understanding what was being produced and how audiences would eventually consume it helped the development and delivery teams prepare for the realities of serving unusually large immersive assets across web and mobile experiences.

The result connected live-action storytelling with an emerging interaction model, giving audiences a sense of entering the environments and creative worlds represented in the films rather than watching them solely through a conventional rectangular video player.

Production Readiness & Media Delivery

I created custom development, staging, and production environments along with deployment pipelines supporting the experience through development and launch.

The production environment used Nginx, with servers configured and optimized around the types of files they were responsible for delivering. That included caching strategies, cross-domain font exceptions, custom routing, log rotation, and response headers, with particular attention paid to the demands created by large stereoscopic and non-stereoscopic 360° video assets.

This infrastructure work supported the larger delivery responsibility. The goal was not simply to configure servers, but to ensure that the creative and application work produced by the broader team could reach audiences reliably once the experience moved into production.

Launch & Experiential Reach

In Their Chucks extended Converse’s Made By You campaign into an emerging form of immersive storytelling, connecting a global brand campaign with interactive 360° film, mobile applications, Google Cardboard, and a physical experiential activation.

The New York Made By You activation opened in Flatiron Plaza in March 2015, where Converse combined large-scale Chuck Taylor portrait installations with an immersive component that allowed visitors to experience stories through virtual reality. The broader Made By You campaign brought together more than 400 portraits of Chuck Taylor wearers and extended through activations in cities including New York, London, Mexico City, and Beijing.

For the digital delivery team, reaching that public moment meant aligning development, immersive content, applications, QA, infrastructure, and launch preparation around an experience that crossed the boundary between physical and digital engagement.

Recognition

The immersive work received industry recognition, including an FWA Site of the Day, while In Their Chucks was also shortlisted at Cannes Lions in the Cyber category.

FWA Site Of The Day

From Emerging Technology to Digital Delivery

In Their Chucks is another example of how my technical background expanded into broader digital delivery responsibility. The project required more than understanding how an immersive experience worked technically. It required coordinating the people and dependencies necessary to turn emerging technology into something audiences could actually use.

Working across developers, 360° and live-action production, mobile applications, stakeholders, QA, infrastructure, and launch preparation reinforced an approach that became increasingly central to my work: understand the intended audience experience, connect the disciplines required to produce it, identify delivery risks early, and stay involved through production readiness and launch.

The underlying technology has evolved considerably since 2015, but that delivery challenge remains relevant. New formats succeed when creative ambition, product decisions, technical execution, production, quality, and operational readiness are treated as parts of the same experience.