We raised awareness and motivated engagement with an interactive performance on a giant Galaxy S6 phone in a public space .

The 5 meter high screen at Zurich main station, the biggest train station in Switzerland, showed Swiss singer Seven waiting for people to come and dance while his new song Nobody Wants to Dance played. Whenever a person started to dance, the singer mirrored their moves.

The artist on the screen was not a digital avatar as people might have assumed. It was in fact the singer himself dancing in a room directly behind the screen and interacting with the crowd via a live camera system. Later on, the real-life dance performances were cut together and turned into the song’s official music video.

To create the impression of a digital avatar and not just a video, it was crucial to have the dance moves copied with minimal lag. To achieve this, we had a hidden camera inside the 5 meter-high Galaxy S6 that was wired to a screen inside the booth. The artist could copy the dance moves of the participants almost instantly. Whenever someone started to dance in front of the phone, we had our staff ready to ask them if we could use the footage. Only at that point did they discover that they would be starring in a music video. The event was live-streamed on YouTube and the two most popular Swiss news sites. Then we took the best, craziest, and most entertaining performances of the day and created the official music video for Nobody Wants To Dance.

At the event, we were surprised by the number of people who wanted to dance. To see that from the typically introverted Swiss population was very special.

Our musician Seven turned out to be not only a great performer but also a heart-warming entertainer. His interaction with the dancing crowd was icing on the cake.

- Over 150,000 people were reached at the event (nearly 2% of the Swiss population).

- 760,000 online viewers followed the livestream (9.5% of the Swiss population).

- The music video for Nobody Wants to Dance garnered 500,000 YouTube- and 270,000 Facebook views (altogether 8.25% of Swiss population) and captured loads of enthusiastic comments about the spontaneity of the participants at the train station.

- A week after the event, Seven’s song hit number 1 in Switzerland.