For the annual Publicis Groupe end of year greeting, we hacked the YouTube player functionality to surprise each viewer with a very human and personal response from CEO Maurice Lévy.

The CEO personally interprets each navigation command by the viewer on the fly.

'Fast forward' - he shuffles through his notes to skip to the next part.

'Pause' - he takes a break.

'Change Volume' – he shouts or whispers.

'Change quality' – his office interior downgrades.

By giving each employee the chance to boss the Big Boss, we sparked interest in an otherwise conventional corporate message.

Even if everybody dreams of bossing the big boss, everyone wants to do it differently. By hijacking the YouTube functionality, we gave each of the employees a thousand possible ways to fulfil their fantasy. It’s very unlikely that two out of the 59,000 employees have seen the same video.

The performance against set objectives:

After only one month we had 195,217 unique visitors and 276,780 visits for a total of 1,689,159 page views. The average time spent on the video is about 00:03:05 (which is great for a 3 min video). The video has been shared on Facebook more than 4,200 times and liked more than 4,600 times. Around 2,000 tweets were made about it in only one month.

We received worldwide media coverage in France, UK, US, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Belgium, Spain, South America, Greece, Asia and Australia (more than 500 clippings).