To get people to love our brand, we decided to kill everyone.13ème RUE is a cable network channel, specializing in crime and investigation. As crime shows and series have become extremely popular, this has diluted the perceived expertise of the channel.The objective was to regain our expert status of the genre and increase the audience.

When you are a small channel with a tiny media budget, how can you compete with the big players? How do you reach one third of the French population?To achieve this we created a viral platform to help the brand capture the one thing that makes crime shows such a successful type of programme: the pleasure of finding out “whodunnit?”.We created the first online virtual assassination and investigation platform to get everyone to promote the channel to their friends… by killing them!

The website allows you to virtually hire a killer to assassinate your friends. You choose a hitman, provide your friend’s email address and photo and in a few seconds the website generates a movie-like crime sequence featuring your friend being assassinated.

What makes it a striking experience is the unique 3D in-house designed technology we used that instantly transforms a 2D picture into a 3D face, which is then inserted into your typical assassination movie scene.An experience that is even more striking for your friend who receives an email announcing he has been assassinated, before he clicks and discovers the video of his own assassination.He will then be driven toward investigating, in order to find out who hired the killer. After a short investigation, if he finds out who did it, you will receive an email informing you that you, the crime instigator, have been arrested.

Six months after the launch, the website became a viral phenomenon with a record 22 million visits.

The PR generated created an even bigger buzz on blogs and major competitor TV channels. For a few weeks, jetueunami.com and 13ème RUE became the talk of the town throughout France.And more importantly this meant a dramatic audience increase among our designated target: in those 6 months the audience of 13ème Rue increased by 25% among 20-35 year olds.