Identity Crisis

For cyber criminals, identity is the most vulnerable point of exploitable access. And for businesses, the identity of every employee represents a potential threat to the organization's most precious secrets. Boston agency, Colossus, explores these themes in a fantastical new campaign for client CyberArk.

Cyberark, with offices in 15 countries, is a publicly traded information security company specializing in identity management. The company’s technology is utilized primarily in the financial services, energy, retail, healthcare and government markets.

In addition to a completely reimagined brand identity and voice, the agency worked to create a campaign centered around three effects-driven spots. The videos, directed by Grammy Award-winning duo Dan Shapiro and Alex Topaller, represent CyberArk’s specialized software, but also explore the proliferation and manipulation of human identities; a topic all too relevant with the recent surge in notable cyber attacks.

In a category riddled with the clichés of “diligent businessman working” stock imagery, the CyberArk campaign takes a more distinct and experimental approach. By using visual metaphors and imaginative storytelling, the agency was able to take a highly technical topic and distill it into a more digestible and understandable form.

“CyberArk provides critical solutions for securing the world against cyber attacks. Across organizations, identities continue to proliferate and every identity is a target for attackers trying to steal credentials and data. We protect organizations and their identities -- both human and non-human -- in their most vulnerable moments,” says CyberArk CMO, Simon Mouyal. “This campaign puts an imaginative spin on this very real problem. Colossus was critical in helping us articulate our brand platform in a new and distinctive way. I’m incredibly proud of the bold steps we’ve taken creatively and as a leader in our category.”

Colossus crafted more than 700 pieces of creative split between programmatic, social, video, and OOH. In addition to the United States, the campaign will run globally in Tokyo, Prague, Warsaw, Singapore, and Jakarta. The media will also be distributed through event geofencing and global retargeting.

The first video, titled “DevSecOps”, represents hackers moving through Nesting Doll layers of firewalled protection, until they are able to access a developer’s most sensitive data and passwords. The second video, “Access/Identity'', features irregular behavior and multiple logins from the same user as his form duplicates and his clones become more bizarre. The final video, “PAM” standing for Privileged Access Management, uses a liquid aesthetic to show the propagation of a human identity as it is morphed and stretched from one form to another.

To build the elaborate campaign effects, Colossus used a photogrammetry body imaging system, photographing actors with 162 synchronized Canon T7i 24.2 megapixel cameras. This created a highly-realistic and fully editable three-dimensional rendering of the cast; a technique used in 3D video games like “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare” and movies like “Bladerunner: 2049.”

Ryan Dalton, associate creative director at Colossus added, “The surrealist tone, cloning, and splitting techniques allowed us to tell the complex story of identity proliferation in a really graphic way. We wanted to create something unique that broke free from the trite imagery typically seen in the cyber security space: hooded hackers in a dark room, glitching computer screens, and digitized security locks.”