A most unexpected milestone campaign for a venture capital firm. NYC VC firm, Adjacent, has launched a 5-year anniversary anime film and grassroots campaign.
The unconventional idea comes from American Haiku. The film that presents Adjacent’s founders as mutants – explorers charting unknown territory, building things that don’t exist yet.
Adjacent was founded by venture capitalist, Nico Wittenborn, around the concept of the “adjacent possible,” a theory from evolutionary biology suggesting innovation emerges not from sudden disruption, but from the next step enabled by what already exists. As an investment strategy, it means identifying moments when existing technologies combine to unlock something newly viable – often before the hype begins. Rather than explain this philosophy through charts or jargon, American Haiku translated it into narrative.
The campaign film, Forever Exploring, draws on classic anime and mythic storytelling, avoiding the visual and tonal conventions of both venture capital and B2B marketing. It targets both existing Adjacent portfolio founders and prospective founders, aiming to activate what the firm calls the Adjacent Cascade – that is, to create such a distinctive founder experience that recipients become ambassadors, sharing it with their networks and attracting the next generation of builders.
The film is being hosted both on YouTube and on 1-800-forever-exploring.com and the campaign is the first major work American Haiku has created for Adjacent since being named AOR earlier this year. It is intended to be Chapter 1 of a longer-running narrative universe.
“For us, the adjacent possible isn’t a metaphor. It’s how innovation actually happens,” stated Nico Wittenborn, founder of Adjacent. “The best companies aren’t pulled from thin air. They emerge when existing technologies, ideas and people combine in ways that suddenly make something new viable. We wanted a launch that expressed that belief system, not just described it.”
“Anime became the structural backbone because it gave us a way to dramatize abstract ideas like emergence and collective progress,” added Christian Stone, director at Love Song. “It let us sidestep the minimalist, corporate visual language typical of finance marketing and build something that felt expansive, emotional and addictive.”
“We started with Nico’s investment philosophy. The challenge was a translation exercise: how do you take something like that and turn it into a story world founders can immediately grasp, remember and repeat,” commented Thom Glover, founder and CCO at American Haiku. “This assignment was a great opportunity to build a compelling world for a company in a sector that normally limits itself to the purely explanatory.”
Credits:
Director: Christian Stone
Executive Producer: Daniel Wolfe
Animation: Stray
Creative Director: Dan Williams
Agency: American Haiku
CCO: Thom Glover
Creative Director: Ben Muckensturm
Executive Producer: Mateo Suarez
Head of Operations: Christine DiStasio
CEO: Jessica Kingsbery
Original Music, Mix & Sound Design: Citizen
ECD & Co-Founder: Theo de Gunzburg
Sound Design & Mix: Jack Goodman
Head of Production: Molly Young
Producer: Bomin Weon
Tech Producers: Seb Vidal, Niké Vopalecká
