BBH NY AXE 100 Girls
09.02.16 – As part of the AXE Hair Crisis Relief effort, 100 beautiful girls gathered to give their approval of guys’ hair and hopefully help a few guys out along the way. On the site, you can upload your photo and get a personalized live recommendation for improving your hairstyle.
AXE was launching hair products for men, and BBH had developed the idea of a “Hair Crisis Relief Center” where young men in desperate need of improving their hair could get the help they so desperately need. They wanted to create a website allowing guys to submit photos of themselves and get a hair evaluation. The site would consist of a video feed from a warehouse, where 100 girls had gathered to provide live evaluations.
Sounds pretty straightforward, right? The catch was that the event needed to go on for a couple of months. So did we employ a couple of hundred girls to work in shifts serving the world’s hair-challenged population?
No, instead we created a complex scheme utilizing canned video clips and a Canadian Call Center to give the experience a “live-feel” but using a fraction of the resources required for a live broadcast.
We thought about how to solve this project until our brains melted, but now we’re giving it away — this is the way it worked (Warning: this gets slightly complicated):
The warehouse was split into two areas marked “Approve” and “Don’t Approve” respectively. For each photo, the girls would choose sides, and thus generate an approval percentage. A host appeared picture-in-picture and delivered comments on the result.
We created a director’s tool, a flash app, that was projected onto big screens in the warehouse (screens were later replaced with the submitted photos). Each girl was assigned a number. Through the projections we could control the girls — letting them know which side they should move to.
When the site loaded we would show one of ten main video clips — essentially really long takes where the girls would position themselves according to a randomized number sequence generated by the Flash app. On the site we would pull in photos from the user-contributed photo-pool matching each percentage of approval. Since we had a bunch of these videos it was unlikely that you would notice that the order of numbers was the same when reloading the site.
So how did we create the ratings? When a photo was submitted it went into a queue at the call center. We created a tool that let the call center people evaluate the hair from a multitude of aspects. Besides assigning an approval percentage to the hair, we also included a lot of peripheral details to make the moderators’ comments feel personal, including facial expression, background, clothes etc.
When time to deliver an evaluation to a user, we used clever cutting to hide the shift from the standard video feed to the user’s custom evaluation. We were switching between four camera angles of the warehouse, surveillance-camera style. Each evaluation consisted of canned video and sound assembled together to match the index created by the guys at the call center.
Phew – pretty simple, right!?