Dentsu Creative Blends Nature and AI for Beautiful Jardim Sonoro Electronic Music Festival Campaign

DENTSU CREATIVE Portugal has created a weird and wonderful, AI-generated campaign for Jardim Sonoro (previously known as Lisb-on), one of Europe’s leading electronic music festivals. 

A combination of heritage and music, tourism and culture, leisure and pleasure, the three-day festival is a unique experience designed to awaken the senses. Immersed in nature, within the vibrant city of Lisbon, it is a must-attend event for music lovers, attracting some of the biggest electronic musicians and 25,000 visitors from around the world. 

After a two-year break for Covid, the festival returns in September with a new name, concept and an idyllic new natural setting: the Keil do Amaral Garden in Monsanto. DENTSU CREATIVE Portugal has worked with the event since it launched nine years ago, but this inability to predict what it would now be like, sparked a new creative approach. The agency challenged technology to imagine the unimaginable, blending music and nature, with the help of AI. 

‘Unimaginable’ is one of the first campaigns to use Mid Journey, an advanced visual artificial intelligence platform that, responding to keywords sown by the agency, has generated a uniquely creative graphic output. Merging the features of leading performers, including Todd Terje, Jeff Mills and Jan Blomqvist, with birds and butterflies, leaves and trees, the surreal result is both beautiful and disturbing. Inspired by the images, the agency designed font mix typography and 12 unique and unrepeatable posters.  

The campaign is running in print and OOO in Portugal, on social and online internationally with a film, including soundtrack created by two of the acts: Who Made Who and Hi & Low. 

Gil Correia, creative director at DENTSU CREATIVE Portugal said, “We knew we had to make a special campaign for the festival; something that would mark its return, without abandoning the legacy of recent years. We could never have imagined that the result would be so surprising! Was it a challenge too humanly complex even for the most avant-garde technology? We leave it to the viewer to decide. As each piece shows, there is only one, well-rooted certainty: ‘You can’t imagine Jardim Sonoro Blended with Nature’”.

Jose Diogo Vinagre, director of Jardim Sonoro, added, “As a music event promoter and an active agent of Culture and Art, it’s crucial for Jardim Sonoro to communicate its role in the music and event industry to the community it has built over seven years. DENTSU CREATIVE Portugal has collaborated very closely with the festival since the start and is not only the best agency we could work with, but now a very important part of our team. Edition after edition, the creative and design team accomplish the unimaginable, exceeding the expectations built in the previous year. We truly believe every single award Jardim Sonoro has won comes from DENTSU CREATIVE’s input on the festival Mission.”