Overcome the relatively low engagement for the internal, end of year corporate message from Publics Groupe CEO Maurice Levy. In previous years the video was seen an average 20 000 times ( which is low for a 59 000 employee communication group!)

We decided to turn an impersonal, corporate message into an individual, entertaining experience. So we hacked the YouTube player functionality to surprise each viewer with a very human and personal response from CEO Maurice Levy.

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.

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).

Most corporate communications try desperately not to be boring. We made boring our opportunity.

This year, when people did their traditional skip forward, they discovered we had hijacked the YouTube functionality to give them a very human and personal response from the ‘Big Boss’. They told others via YouTube comments, Facebook and Twitter shares.

And it worked! The video was seen more than 200 000 ( which is great for a 59 000 employees communication group!)