Walmart
Bringing the spark back to a world-famous face
When JKR New York rebranded retail giant Walmart, one big element was the return of the brand’s original mascot – now with AI. And when something needs bringing to life with characterful motion, who you gonna call…?
Walmart's Sparky is an AI-powered digital assistant that answers your online shopping questions, reacting with facial expressions as you type. We were tasked with developing and animating those expressions, with lashings of character and charm.
Sparky was originally introduced as Smiley in 1996, a consumer advocate for Walmart that served to support customers and make them feel good. Sparky follows in Smiley’s footsteps with the purpose of joining together humanity and technology for a new generation.
The project was built using Lottie for direct integration into the Walmart app. This allowed us to create a library of over 60 vector animations whilst maintaining very low file sizes.
These Lottie files were created to sequence through complex conversations, allowing Sparky to transition across a variety of emotions to respond to all sorts of customer enquiries, whether thoughtfulness, understanding or a knowing wink is in order!
Prompting personality
Each expression has a variety of additional states to allow for interstitial transitionary paths of navigation, allowing immediate switches between states ranging through 12 emotions and hidden festive easter eggs, depending on the user's text prompts.
Sparks are flying
Sparky has hit the headlines since launching into the world as a symbol of how people are changing the way they shop. Find out more in this Forbes article.
Credits
Services
Character exploration & development, Static & R&D motion tests, Character refinement, Motion development, Artworking & design, Animation production, Creative direction, Production and Accounts services
Deliverables
Character & motion guidelines, 13 x animations
Client
Walmart
Agency
JKR New York
Executive Creative Director
Mike Davies
Design
Sam Stoney, Eilidh Reid
Animation
Sam Stoney, Stewart Harvey, Dev Joshi, Mike Labrow, Jose Meneses
Executive Producer
Jen Judd
Global Accounts Director
Katie Nash-Chu
Producers
Meg Shipton, Sophie Neophytou
