Friends are one of the most important parts of our lives, yet they are often something we take for granted. In developing the FRIENDS campaign, we knew that to make the work relevant we couldn’t just talk about friendship—we needed to give everyone a way to participate. So we created the Friends Photo Tool to empower people to share what makes their friendships unique—both on Facebook and out in the world.

The Friends Photo Tool was launched as part of the FRIENDS integrated campaign, and was built to be an evergreen photo-sharing product on Facebook. The product landing page invites people to select their favorite picture from a gallery of curated Facebook photos of them with their friends. After selecting a photo, people are prompted to add text or emoji and then share.

We also wanted to find a way to help people celebrate their friendships off platform. So we used digital billboards to hero real friendships on some of the biggest screens across the United Kingdom. The best user generated images were dynamically fed to more than 1,000 digital billboards in major cities. As people shared more photos, we refreshed the screens with new content reflecting real friendships in the UK.

The Friends Photo Tool was designed and built for Facebook using HTML canvas. The landing page automatically pulls in your most meaningful photos with your closest friends. Photos were then composited on the fly allowing device-specific emoji styles and text to automatically scale-to-fit. Then, to dynamically push photos to our digital OOH placements we designed a flash banner to communicate with each digital OOH board via a permenta bridge to media servers. This innovative system helped us update our OOH and bring a real-time pulse of friendship to our digital campaign across the UK.

The Friends Photo tool launched in the UK and spread virally around the world. Tens of thousands of people from 124 countries used it to share photos and celebrate what makes their friendships unique. The Friends Photo Tool gave everyone a fun way to share their friendships and, with the help of digital OOH, celebrate them with the world.

The Friends Photo tool launched in the United Kingdom and spread virally around the world. Tens of thousands of people from 124 countries used it to share photos and celebrate what makes their friendships unique. The best user generated images were dynamically fed to more than 1,000 digital billboards across the UK. As more photos were shared, the UGC content was refreshed showing the real-time pulse of friendship. The Friends Photo Tool gave everyone a fun way to share their friendships and, with the help of digital OOH, celebrate them with the world.