How Rise built an adaptive music video that honors artistic vision

In this series, we challenge brands to create the “impossible ad” using AI-powered tools. Ahead of the campaign’s public launch, here’s an exclusive look at how Rise New York & Partners helped WAAW by Alok turn a music video into an adaptive brand experience, proving AI can scale an official creative vision without replacing human authorship.

When DJ Alok took the stage at Coachella, he made a massive public stand, asserting that technology should never copy or replace the soul of human artists. This powerful performance became the catalyst for a bold experiment led by the agency Rise New York & Partners.

This wasn’t just a creative exercise. It was a strategic move to rethink how fans experience a brand. For WAAW by Alok, the DJ’s line of premium headphones and speakers engineered for immersive sound, the goal was to turn a product purchase into an exclusive, personalized music video. To do this, Rise built an AI-powered marketing engine that adapts to a fan’s surroundings and inputs while staying true to Alok’s original vision.

While anyone can use AI to edit a video today, the result is often a derivative imitation. Rise set out to prove a different premise, asking a much harder question: Can one official music video live in millions of different worlds and still remain the same piece of art?

Starting with human craft

“The ‘impossible’ idea for WAAW by Alok was building one music video that is unique for every single fan, while keeping creative control,” explains Flavio Vidigal, partner and chief creative officer at Rise.

Rise began with strict human authorship. They first created one official film defined by Alok’s music, Brazilian illustrator Rogério Puhl’s pop-art style, and deliberate human intention.

Historically, music is released as a fixed object, one video for everyone. But fans don’t experience music the same way. They bring it into their own worlds.

The goal wasn’t for fans to co-create a new video from scratch, but to see if their worlds could shape the official film. By defining the expressive inputs behind their vision, like clothing, accessories, and preferred aesthetics, fans could bring their own identities into the video without losing the magic of the original.

Watch the video

Link to YouTube Video

DJ Alok worked with Rise New York & Partners, using Google AI tools, to create an adaptive music video for his WAAW by Alok headphones and speakers brand.

Building an adaptive ecosystem

To bring this idea to life, Rise built a multiproduct digital ecosystem that weaves those personal choices, called a “Beat Profile,” alongside live signals directly into the film. Here’s how each product was used in the ecosystem.

• Gemini Omni acts as the brain, managing the video, sound design, and text adaptation workflows.
• Google Maps API detects local environments to weave real-life landmarks into the narrative.
• Google Weather API adapts the lighting and weather to match the fan’s actual surroundings.
• YouTube & Trends feeds trend data to ensure aesthetic styles remain culturally relevant.
• Vertex AI & Veo uses AI video generation to create high-fidelity video clips, merging fan context with official art.
• Google Cloud securely hosts the architecture and massive rendering pipelines.

During testing, Rise successfully adapted the video across 50 distinct fan worlds, spanning Europe, Latin America, and North America, all while the original music master remained completely unchanged. The experience pulled audience cues from their Beat Profile, like location, weather, style, and mood inputs. For a rainy London profile, the system used Maps and Weather data to bring that environment into the film. While the fan shapes the context, the artists retain the vision.

Guarding the creative vision

To preserve the integrity of the official film, Rise needed a rigorous system of governance: the “Artistic DNA Gate.” Over a 16-week test, a team of 10 creators evaluated the AI-generated outputs against five strict criteria.

• Story: Does each narrative beat preserve its original action, meaning, and emotional intent?
• Adaptive zones: Are changes confined to the creator-approved parts of the scene, with fan-selected elements, including weather or landmarks, integrated naturally?
• Film treatment: Do the lighting, color, composition, and camera movement remain faithful to the director’s treatment?
• Concept art style: Does the output remain faithful to the visual language Rogério Puhl established in the original concept art?
• Identity layer: Does the adaptation naturally translate the fan’s selected identity and personal style into the film?

These guardrails act as the ultimate creative authority, defining exactly what visual elements must remain fixed, where adaptation is permitted, and what the system must reject.

During a 16-week proof of concept, a 10-person team tested the system using 50 controlled Beat Profiles across four countries. These profiles used specific inputs, such as location, weather, and aesthetic preferences, to test how the official film adapted. Of 23,234 total candidate outputs, 4,320 (18.6%) cleared the Artistic DNA Gate. The remaining 81.4% were rejected or returned for further generation and refinement. Reaching an approved visual direction required a median of 62 style-frame iterations. Once that direction was locked, each 8-second video beat took roughly 13 generation rounds.

“The biggest myth this project debunked is that you have to surrender your creative vision to the machine,” says Vidigal. “We proved that we can maintain our creative authorship and vision, steering the wheel creatively, while the machine scales the work for us.”

Putting governed personalization into practice

For marketers building adaptive ecosystems, this experiment offers three starting principles:

• Identify the core. Establish your Artistic DNA Gate. Define the strict visual and tonal elements that must remain fixed.
• Govern. Don’t prompt. Stop treating AI as a vending machine. Build workflows with generation, review, and refinement loops to uphold integrity.
• Use consented data for context. Move beyond using location or weather data just for ad targeting. Use real-time signals as creative inputs.

This experiment signals a fundamental shift in how we build campaigns. A hero asset no longer needs to be a static file. It can be an adaptive brand experience. Ultimately, WAAW by Alok proves that the future of marketing is about adapting a human-authored vision to many individuals without losing what made that vision original.