Echo Escape
View the case- Brand
- Amazon
- Year
- 2017
- Objective
- Awareness
- Industry
- Entertainment
- Mechanic
- Puzzle
- Platform
- Installation
- Agency
- AKQA
- With
- UNIT9
Objective
Amazon needed to make Alexa's capabilities land with an ad-resistant crowd of geeks and millennials — not through a product pitch, but by trapping them somewhere they had to actively talk their way out using her. The activation also doubled as a stealth promo for the Amazon Prime Video series Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan ahead of its 2018 premiere, and a chance to make the pairing of Echo with smart-home gadgets feel tangible rather than theoretical, both on the New York Comic Con show floor and, via a live stream, to a gaming audience well beyond it.
Solution
Teams of up to six entered a five-room escape experience built on the New York Comic Con show floor, cast as operatives unraveling a CIA plot pulled straight from Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan. Fitted with wireless mics, players had no screens or buttons — every move came down to talking to Alexa, calling out commands to kill the lights, run a search, place a call, or pull up a video feed, while live actors and a laser maze upped the tension along the way. A run took about 20 minutes and closed with an interrogation scene. The room reset and reopened every 15 minutes across all four days of the convention. The format then moved to Twitch, where three streamers played the room live while over a million viewers used emotes and their own Alexa commands to help or sabotage them in real time.
Results
More than 5,000 people queued to play, with all reservations claimed within the first hour of opening. The Twitch broadcast reached 1.5 million viewers over its three-hour run, with more than 1 million of them actively intervening to help or hinder the teams, generating 43,000+ comments and gameplay interactions.
- 1
Visitors at New York Comic Con find the Amazon Echo Escape pavilion on the show floor and book a time slot, with slots filling within the first hour and a queue of thousands stretching the wait.
- 2
Each booked group of up to six players is fitted with wireless microphones so Alexa can hear commands anywhere in the space, then briefed that they are trapped inside a spy story from the "Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan" universe with about 20 minutes to escape.
- 3
In the first room, the team controls the environment entirely by speaking to an Echo device — asking Alexa to turn off the lights reveals hidden UV-lit markings, and toggling lights and ceiling fans surfaces the data needed to solve each puzzle; only one person can speak at a time, forcing the group to coordinate who addresses Alexa.
- 4
Puzzles escalate from single voice commands to multi-step sequences, such as dictating an arithmetic problem to Alexa and combining the numbers she returns into a passcode that opens the next door.
- 5
To advance, players place an in-fiction call through the Echo Show to a CIA operative who briefs them by video, and receive voice messages from the character Jack Ryan that steer the story and hint at what to do next.
- 6
One player is pulled from the group and isolated in a separate room, handcuffed to a chair; guided by Jack Ryan through an Echo Show, that player must solve puzzles alone and relay the answers back to the rest of the team.
- 7
The final room is an Arduino-controlled laser maze of ten beams the group must cross without triggering any of them, while one teammate stays isolated in a room facing the maze, so the crossing depends on voice coordination between the split-up team.
- 8
A session ends when the team escapes before the timer runs out, with each group's completion time posted to a leaderboard that visitors compare against one another.
- 9
A linked online broadcast lets three teams of Twitch streamers race through the same room live on air, while viewers use emotes and their own Alexa commands to help or hinder the players — opening doors to let selfie-seeking fans in, triggering alarms, or ordering pizza to distract them.
