Publicis Omnicom celebrates the human side of the merger

Last year, I thought it was a tough brief to do something interesting with Maurice Lévy’s end of year digital greeting.  We were chuffed with the interest generated by The Human Youtube Player, but it only made the brief for this year more difficult.

Any kind of follow up or sequel is risky, but I was truly delighted with the idea that the team came back with.  The More The Merrier : The more people that join in during the video, the merrier it will become.

We got our geeks to develop a fancy facial detection algorithm that allows a webcam to count how many people are actually watching the video together.

What I like about the concept this year is that it uses digital to physically bring people together to watch the greeting.  It changes the KPI from YouTube views to viewers.

If you watch the video by yourself you won’t notice anything out of the ordinary, but if you add one friend you’ll see Maurice Lévy delivering his corporate speech in a confetti storm.

Bring a few more colleagues and you may see gospel singers, cheerleaders, Chinese dragons and a few other surprises as Maurice Lévy tries to keep his cool.

7 people unlocks an autotuned version of the speech (available on soundcloud).

We had a one day shoot and all 10 speeches were recorded without any green screen.

There are some surprises built in for when there’s no one in front of the webcam. And if you’re by yourself you can still enjoy the experience by downloading some friends.

At the time we were briefed we couldn’t mention anything about the future merger with Omnicom. The More The Merrier was a nice workaround which let us acknowledge the elephant in the room, without getting us into any legal issues.

Try it out here : www.publicisgroupewishes2014.com

Agency : DigitasLBi Paris
Production : Prodigious