It’s safe to say 2020 had been a strange year: a pandemic, a lockdown, a curfew, another lockdown… And with this stream of bad news came another one: Christmas wouldn’t really feel like Christmas this year. No Christmas market, no large family gatherings, no picture with Santa…

The brief was therefore built around an objective of closeness with the audience to enable them to get through the end of the year in a warmer and more positive way than the rest of 2020. We had to think about a new format to boost engagement, proximity and brand liking, to complement the more traditional TV campaign.

In 2020, Christmas went online too.

Bouygues Telecom disclosed the most popular phone number on the planet: Santa Claus’ one.

After messaging Santa on his phone number through WhatsApp, he responded with a video from Lapland. It allowed kids (and grown-ups!) to have a personalised video from Santa and a bit of Christmas spirit!

We used AI technologies, and produced several algorithms, combining text-to-speech, machine-learning and computer vision, to create realistic lipsynced videos.

Thanks to an auto-scaled infrastructure (up to dozens of compute instances), videos were generated in a few seconds and sent to users immediately after sending their text message.

Finally, we partnered with Voxygen to synthesize the Santa’s voice, and make the magic happens.

Bouygues Telecom has a human-centric brand platform embodied by the tagline “we are meant to be together”, They promote technology as a tool to bring people together, an ally to enhance, strengthen and expand the relationships with our loved ones.

The purpose of the campaign was to serve this mission: to find a technological way (accessible and popular) to bring people together at the end of this year, and this despite the health restrictions, to allow everyone to share an exceptional experience, a moment of emotion or a good laugh with family or friends for this end of year.

The target for this activation was the general public with a special focus on families with children… also those who happen to be the most likely to pay a premium for their internet and phone subscriptions.

A 100% digital campaign launched 1 month before Christmas.

A first teaser period on social media + a “Like to remind” on Twitter.

The first few days, the operation was launched organically, to be able to manage in real time the server capacities with AWS, to prepare for a large traffic flow at the media launch.

The digital media plan (about 15 days of media coverage):

>>a 45-seconds launch film + 15-seconds cutdowns for VOL and social media.

>>a tutorial video 15’’

>>The brand invested a lot on Twitter, especially with a trending topic + a spotlight video on December 22nd : a day of community management animation with Santa Claus (#AlloPapaNoël)

>>A micro-influence campaign on Instagram (about thirty micro-influencers with a family audience between 10K and 50K followers).

>>A video in collaboration with the media Konbini

>>CRM mailings among Bouygues Telecom customer database

3 million videos generated (about 300 000 videos on the 24th of December)

A trending topic with +16 million impressions (x 8 vs. Christmas 2019 TT impressions)

400 000 unique visitors

18% click rate on sponsored video on Twitter

A strong appropriation from people on social media

PR impact (French daily TV news and others popular TV shows)