• by Steve McClellan , June 22, 2016

J. Walter Thompson Worldwide won the first Grand Prix for Creative Data Collection and Research for the “Next Rembrandt” project it created for client ING. The idea driving the project: exploring innovation in art. 

The agency and the outside experts it collaborated with used data and technology to make a portrait in the exact style of the 17^th century Dutch Master. Some 160,000 fragments from 346 Rembrandt paintings were analyzed using 3-D scanners and digital files. Algorithms and facial recognition technology were used to understand Rembrandt’s style before a 3-D printer applying 13 layers of paint-based ink created a portrait of a 17^th century man in the exact manner that Rembrandt himself would have used. 

“I don’t think you could have asked for better more inspiring and slightly scary entry,” said jury president Tash Whitmey, Group CEO Havas Helia. Last year, the first year for the category, no Grand Prix was awarded, Whitmey noted, because no entry met the benchmark the jury wanted to establish. But “Next Rembrandt” surpasses the benchmark and articulates what the category is all about “at both the highest and most integrated and most through way…It took multiple sources of data and used that data to be the creative.”