Dell and Intel's What Lives Inside launched on Hulu in March 2015, turning over 6,000 audience character sketches into a fantasy web series created by Pereira
Dell and Intel Turn Audience Sketches Into a Hulu Fantasy Series
What Lives Inside is a four-part branded fantasy web series produced for Dell and Intel by Pereira & O'Dell, premiering exclusively on Hulu on March 25, 2015, in which over 6,000 audience-submitted character sketches were considered for inclusion in a film anchored by the Dell Venue 8 7000 Series tablet and Intel RealSense technology.
The campaign operates at the intersection of participatory storytelling and product demonstration. Rather than position the Dell Venue 8 7000 Series as an object to be explained, the creative team embedded it as a narrative instrument — a device through which the film's characters bring imagination to life. The series was shot in the United States and distributed exclusively through Hulu, giving it the platform weight of a premium streaming debut rather than the quieter footprint of a typical branded content release. Of more than 6,000 character sketches submitted by the public during an open audition period, 144 were incorporated directly into the finished film, blurring the line between brand audience and creative collaborator.
The trailer released in March 2015 served as the campaign's public-facing launch asset, functioning simultaneously as a promotional teaser and a standalone piece of entertainment media. It established the tone of the series — fantastical, visually ambitious, emotionally grounded — while communicating the participatory mechanic that made What Lives Inside structurally distinct from conventional advertising. The cast included J.K. Simmons, Colin Hanks, and Catherine O'Hara, lending the production the credibility of a legitimate entertainment property. Media strategy was led by Pete Fishman. The trailer earned a Clapboard Score of 79 out of 100, reflecting strong creative ambition and effective integration of product narrative within an entertainment format.
The United States PC market was under significant structural pressure in 2015. According to Gartner, worldwide PC shipments totalled approximately 300 million units in 2015, down around nine percent year over year, with Lenovo, HP, Dell, ASUS, and Apple comprising the five largest vendors. Lenovo held the leading position with approximately 19.8 percent global market share, according to Gartner, while the broader category faced declining consumer demand as tablet and smartphone adoption reshaped purchase behaviour. In this environment, a straightforward product advertisement carried inherent risk: the category story was contracting, and specification-led messaging had diminishing returns with audiences who were already disengaged from traditional PC advertising.
Pereira & O'Dell's strategic response was to sidestep the category conversation entirely and compete in the attention economy of entertainment. What Lives Inside was the fourth installment of Intel's Inside Films initiative, which had begun in 2011 with Inside, starring Emmy Rossum and directed by D.J. Caruso, as reported by pereiraodell.com. The Beauty Inside followed in 2012 with an interactive premise that allowed public members to portray the central character, and The Power Inside continued the format in 2013 with Harvey Keitel, per pereiraodell.com. Each iteration deepened the brand's relationship with narrative entertainment as a media category. By 2015, the model was sophisticated enough to absorb a participatory casting mechanism at scale — more than 6,000 submitted sketches — without losing creative coherence. PJ Pereira, Chief Creative Officer at Pereira & O'Dell, articulated the product integration strategy precisely, stating in an interview with Shots.net in March 2015: "We had to find a role to make the product not the subject of the story we are telling, but a character." That framing — product as character, not subject — is the strategic spine of the entire campaign.
Robert Stromberg directed What Lives Inside. Stromberg brings a production design and visual effects background that made him an unusually calibrated choice for a series whose central creative conceit is the transformation of hand-drawn character sketches into a living fantasy world. His directorial sensibility aligned directly with the campaign's core mechanic: audience members submitted original character drawings during an open call, and 144 of those submissions were woven into the fabric of the film, making the visual language of the series inseparable from the participatory process that generated it.
The editorial work was handled by Rick Pearson ACE, whose credit signals the production operated at a level of post-production craft consistent with professional long-form entertainment rather than branded content. Heidi Levitt, C.S.A., served as Casting Director, and her involvement explains the calibre of the on-screen talent: J.K. Simmons, Colin Hanks, and Catherine O'Hara anchor a cast that could credibly inhabit a fantasy narrative without the performance feeling incidental to a commercial brief, as documented in campaign records cited by stevediggins.com and shots.net.
PJ Pereira described the creative philosophy behind the audience integration with precision in his March 2015 interview with Shots.net: "This time, because the central theme is their creativity, that's what is on display." That statement captures the structural elegance of the execution. The Dell Venue 8 7000 Series tablet, featuring Intel RealSense technology and an Intel Atom processor, is not demonstrated through a feature walkthrough — it is demonstrated through what it enables creatively. The trailer, released in March 2015 in the United States, operates as a tonal and narrative promise: it communicates the visual ambition of the series, the emotional register of the performances, and the imaginative scale of a world co-authored by thousands of participants, all within a single film asset.
No third-party verified viewership figures for the What Lives Inside trailer or the broader series on Hulu are publicly available at the time of writing. What is documented and verifiable is the scale of the participatory mechanic: more than 6,000 character sketches were submitted by the public in response to the open audition call, and 144 of those submissions were integrated into the finished film, as confirmed by campaign records cited at pereiraodell.com and clapboard.com. That volume of organic creative participation represents a meaningful indicator of audience engagement with the campaign's premise prior to the series debut.
The exclusive Hulu premiere on March 25, 2015, positioned What Lives Inside within the premium streaming ecosystem at a moment when branded entertainment on streaming platforms was still an emergent format in the United States, giving the series structural differentiation from browser-distributed branded content. The four-part weekly release format sustained audience attention across multiple touchpoints rather than compressing impact into a single viewing event.
Structurally, the campaign resolves a persistent challenge in technology advertising: how to demonstrate product capability without reducing the creative work to a feature inventory. By making the Dell Venue 8 7000 Series a narrative instrument rather than a subject, the trailer and series communicated product relevance through emotional and creative context — a method that scales more durably than specification-led messaging in a contracting PC market. The campaign's Clapboard Score of 79 out of 100 reflects that structural effectiveness, acknowledging both the creative ambition of the execution and the sophistication of its product integration within an entertainment format.
What Lives Inside is a four-part branded fantasy web series created by Pereira & O'Dell for Dell and Intel, premiering exclusively on Hulu on March 25, 2015. The series integrated over 6,000 audience-submitted character sketches, with 144 incorporated into the finished film, and starred J.K. Simmons, Colin Hanks, and Catherine O'Hara.
Robert Stromberg directed What Lives Inside. His visual effects and production design background made him a precise fit for a series built around the transformation of hand-drawn audience sketches into a fantasy world. Rick Pearson ACE served as editor, and Heidi Levitt, C.S.A., handled casting for the production.
Pereira & O'Dell created the What Lives Inside trailer and series for Dell and Intel. The agency's Chief Creative Officer, PJ Pereira, led the strategic and creative approach, framing the Dell Venue 8 7000 Series tablet as a character within the narrative rather than the subject of a conventional product advertisement.
Dell and Intel invited the public to submit original character sketches as part of an open audition process. More than 6,000 sketches were submitted, and 144 were incorporated directly into the finished film, as documented by pereiraodell.com and clapboard.com. This made audience members active creative contributors rather than passive viewers.
The campaign featured the Dell Venue 8 7000 Series tablet, which incorporated Intel RealSense technology and an Intel Atom processor. Rather than presenting these specifications directly, the creative strategy positioned the tablet as a narrative instrument through which the film's characters gave life to imaginative ideas.
What Lives Inside is the fourth installment of Intel's Inside Films initiative, according to pereiraodell.com. The series began in 2011 with Inside, starring Emmy Rossum, followed by The Beauty Inside in 2012 and The Power Inside in 2013. Each project deepened Intel's commitment to branded entertainment as a primary communications format in the United States.
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