IDEA:The Beauty of a Second is an international campaign conceived for the web and a worldwide audience and target, to build maximum awarness for Montblanc as a watchmaker brand. The simple idea was to ask people to create a 1-second-long video that celebrates the fragile beauty that can be found in this small unit of time. We teamed up with film-director Wim Wenders and challenged people to capture beauty in a 1-second-long video, creating the shortest ever short-film contest. People competed online at montblanc-onesecond.com by uploading their one-second videos of beauty.

OBJECTIVE:Montblanc is an iconic European luxury brand that has built its heritage on the writing instruments. In the last 10 years it has diversified its business to other product categories, such as watches, but people still identify the brand mostly with writing instruments. 2011 was the year that celebrates 190 years of the chronograph’s invention by Nicolas Rieussec. This was a perfect moment to communicate the Montblanc Nicolas Riuessec Chronograph, a luxury chrono named after its inventor, and to build awareness for the Montblanc brand as a chronograph and watchmaker by leveraging the anniversary.

RESULTS:The first compilation posted to vimeo received a million views in 10 days.This created a 3,000% increase in submissions from the first to the third round.The competition was featured in GQ, Vanity Fair, New York Times, Forbes, Huffington Post, ESPN, The Independent. 4,436 videos were submitted. An estimated total of 4m video views (submission views on site and off site). An estimated 40m media impressions (including video loads, headline loads, ambient media). The project was screened by Vimeo at the South by Southwest festival, Salon International de la Haute Horlogerie in Geneva.

RELEVANCE:The Beauty of a Second idea is to look carefully inside a second and discover its inner beauty. In a way this is what Nicolas Rieussec did with his invention of the chronograph, discovering for the first time that inside a second there’s a lot more to tell.That’s the beauty and the relevance of the challenge, and its name and artistic pursuit is the most appropriate for a brand known globally as a patron of arts and culture.