Originally part of an integrated global promotion for McDonald’s with glow-in-the-dark Happy Meal toys, the Avatarise Yourself promotion was first developed in Chicago. We pitched the concept with a live 3D Avatar demo, literally using the head of McDonald’s European marketing director. Upon approval, our team in France supervised 7 different language versions for 18 countries throughout Europe. Working with the production team in the United States, the site launched in December and quickly built enormous traffic virally around the world.

The website received 3 million visits during the first 2 weeks of the promotion, and almost 7 million in total. Buzz started immediately on social networks as people started sharing photos. Nearly half the visits resulted in people uploading images—an astonishing 3,226,439 photos were uploaded and 2,239,166 Avatars were created. The program quickly went viral with 6,754,422 visits by 3,471,865 unique visitors in two months. The English language site in Finland and Austria attracted visitors from around the world, driving 2,876,600 visits to the Finland site alone (and there are only 5.3 million people in the entire country!).