The Loyalty League Assembles

The brief

APLC's 2026 programme centres on behavioural science, loyalty economics and AI: how identity, incentive and technology shape the way loyalty professionals build their own programmes. Loyalty Group APAC wanted the conference experience itself to run on those same ideas and make the case before a single keynote began. HyperCinema's solution was to design something attendees would live through in the days before they ever set foot in the venue.

The mechanic

Every attendee receives an email invitation to a secure personalised mobile website. The experience was intentionally light, needing just a couple of clicks and a selfie to create their personalised superhero avatar. Behind the scenes, we map job titles to one of 25 loyalty superhero personas, giving each attendee a few options to choose from so the result still feels bespoke.

Each persona carries a name and a power line written in the same fun tone of voice register as the art direction. A Head of Data becomes Dr Correlation: "Can materialise webs of connections in any data set. Can't prove a single one caused anything." A CRM manager becomes Bloom: "Able to grow loyalty in any abandoned CRM. No member in their care has ever wilted." The humour lets conference attendees, people who spend their working lives evaluating personalisation and AI tools, see the mechanic and laugh along with it, out in the open. Each hero carries more than a name and an art style too: a light rationale ties every power line back to a real loyalty industry pain point, so the joke carries relevance, grounded in something real.

The UX

APLC attendees are busy people so speed and choice shaped the flow: the whole mobile-first experience, from email click to finished hero card, is optimised to take only minutes. With only a job title to work from, attendees were dealt a short hand of persona options, so nobody ended up stuck with a hero they didn't want. Anyone who preferred not to submit a selfie could still take part, choosing an elegant no-face option.

The art direction

The look draws from 1970s and 80s Marvel-era superhero comics: bold linework, primary colour palettes, a slightly worn print quality. It's tongue-in-cheek and deliberately rough around the edges, in on the joke that a data analyst or partnerships manager is being rendered as a caped hero. Some personas lean into that self-awareness directly, X-Ray's super powers of "customer insights second to none, sometimes a little too detailed." leave him a little embarrassed knowing TMI…

Before the conference - Generating the Buzz

Once an attendee locks in their persona, they receive a digital holographic character card of their superhero character, and are prompted to share it to LinkedIn with a hashtag tied to a small prize incentive. Every post is an attendee advertising APLC to their own network in character, ahead of the doors opening.

More than 1 in 5 attendees who received a hero card posted it, and ticket sales in the final seven days ran at three times the 2025 rate. The buzz the sharing generated turned the reveal into APLC's closing marketing push.

At the conference - The Personalised Lanyard

The same character asset becomes the physical lanyard, printed and ready for collection at the conference sign in. Each attendee's character also syncs into APLC's conference app, so the persona follows them from their inbox onto the show floor.

After the conference - The Follow Up

After APLC wrapped, every attendee received their own Loyalty League comic strip: a short, self-contained story introducing their hero's arch enemy and a signature catchphrase, playing on classic comic book tropes. It landed first as a digital share asset, with a bespoke printed keepsake version available as a special gift.