We combined the power of culturally relevant selfies, the iconic landscape of Times Square and the massive reach of digital media to creative a unique and emotional investment between audiences of all ages and our film’s stars, The Emotions: Joy, Anger, Sadness, Fear & Disgust.

Using 1st to market facial recognition technology, a person’s face was scanned in real-time and an “emotional selfie” of the user and the character from our film that matched their current feeling was created. The selfie was shareable to all social platforms. Further engagement took place as fans played interactive games with each Emotion using their facial expressions as the controller.

We built an “emotional selfie” engine in web form (not a downloadable app) that allowed us to bring the experience TO USERs via desktop and mobile rich media ads, social platforms, and out-of-home advertising.

The experience was used across General Audience and Kids media in desktop and mobile, as well on social platforms, but the scale didn’t stop there. Kicking off on Memorial Day, we sent a street team to Times Square to create a large 5 day stunt. Street teams asked pedestrians to use the “emotional selfie” experience on iPads and share their images to Twitter with a dedicated hashtag. Scale increased with national promotion on Twitter inviting users to feature their images in Times Square as well. The pictures were aggregated in real-time on a Times Square billboard for fans to see. Photos of selfies on the billboard were then tweeted back to those users’ handles as keepsakes.

The Emotional Selfie/Game Experience garnered over 80MM IMPRESSIONS in digital media, with an engagement rate that was 24% above the benchmark. The Times Square billboard stunts reached over 1MM people and there were 49 featured submissions up on the billboard, per hour.

Disney/Pixar’s Inside Out resonated with audiences of all ages and at the time of release, reached the highest opening weekend for an original film, live action or otherwise with a $90.4MM release weekend. It was the #1 Animated movie for 3 weeks in a row.

With $356.5MM for the year, the film was the 4th highest grossing movie in the US for 2015.