Carte Noire Experience
Carte Noire
Issue 22 | March 2012
Agency
Proximity BBDO, Paris
Creative Team
Creative Director: Valérie Levy Harrar ; Copywriter and Artistic Director: Audrey Tamic ; Artistic Director: Rémi Jamin ; Art Buyer: Francine Jiminiga ; Sound Designer: Aymeric Lepage
Production Team
Creative Development Manager: Guillaume Rancurel; Flash Developer: Marco Neves; Motion Designer: Steve Morel; 3D Designer: Jeremy Delhuvenne, Sébastien Jourdain; Flash Animator: Damien Moreau; Chez Eddy: Julie Lahaye - Verhoeven and Davy Koskas
Other Credits
General Manager: Emmanuel Devezeaux de Rancougne; Team Manager: Aude Beauvallet; Project Manager: Anne-Sophie Riou; Sr Brand Manager, Carte Noire:Elise Martin
Date
December 2011
Background
For 20 years, the brand strategy for the French coffee Carte Noire had been to talk about desire. But to win a new, younger audience the positioning needed to be radically changed.
What is the most precious commodity to today’s youth? Time.
Carte Noire set out to breathe life into this new strategy, to give young people the time to live stronger.
Idea
Where does today’s jeunesse d’oré spend much of its time? On YouTube. The agency set out to create a YouTube experience that would make a visitor to Carte Noire’s channel a Master of Time and give them an experience they would want to talk about on Facebook and on Twitter.
Watching a video on Youtube, the viewer was asked to take control. Take control of time. He or she is then taken on a journey that gets faster and faster until they are teleported to 2047 when they are offered a coffee on the moon.
Results
The objectives were to increase the number of visitors to the Carte Noire YouTube channel and within weeks of the campagn launch, numbers had increased by a multiple of ten to 1.8 million. Many thousands tweeted, many thousands ‘liked’.
Our Thoughts
It’s not the first nor is it the last YouTube takeover/makeover but what I liked about this was the personalisation, the way your name and Facebook profile photograph keep popping up throughout the journey across time. There are some amusing touches.
I like the end sequence and the Twitter bird in a space helmet. If I’m honest, I found the whole thing a huge leap away from anything to do with coffee as a product but the Editorial Committee told me that the whole experience was a metaphor for a caffeine rush and the target audience would get it, even if I didn’t. Maybe I’m too English. At any rate, the numbers speak for themselves.