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.

We wanted, Maurice Lévy, to personally address each and every one of the 59 000 employees. Having him take a leading role and using him in an original and innovative way was a real opportunity to show employees how the Groupe takes a digital direction without forgetting its traditional roots.

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.

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

Our plan was to wait for people to do their annual skip forward and let them discover themselves this year’s trick. And they did! Word spread quickly to colleagues through YouTube and Facebook comments, and Tweets. The video was seen more than 200 000 times (which is great for a 59 000 employee communication group).

In previous years, end of year message video was seen on average by only 1 in 3 employees of the Publicis Groupe. With 59 000 employees across 104 countries, it’s the 3rd largest communications group in the world. In such a large organisation, encapsulating the Groupe and its values to make people feel part of, and connected with, a ‘bigger something’ is a real issue.

In order to keep the hijack a surprise, we sent the video to the 59 000 employees of the group three weeks before Christmas, just like we do every year. Indeed, habits and boredom were at the core of our strategy. We then just had to wait for people to do their annual skip forward and let them discover the trick for themselves.