It’s safe to say 2020 has been a strange year: the pandemic, lockdown, the economic and environment crisis (to name a few). That’s why BETC, BETC Fullsix and French Telecoms operator, Bouygues Telecom, wanted to end the year with some joy and Christmas spirit.
A digital Christmas experience
2020 has gone online — shopping, school, paperwork, meetings, and Christmas is no different. To comply with this year’s social distancing rules, the Telecoms brand shared the most popular phone number on the planet: Santa Claus.
After messaging Santa on +33 6 44 63 59 22 via WhatsApp, he responds with a video direct from Lapland.
Designed by BETC Paris agency and developed in collaboration with BETC Fullsix Studio, it allows kids (and grown-ups!) to have a personalised video from Santa by using AI, creativity, data and technology. And a bit of Christmas spirit, of course!
A.I. Santa
The innovative and creative agency teams joined forces to share some magic this Christmas. The messages sent to Santa Claus are processed by text-to-speech technology, which are then generated to MP3 thanks to a synthetic voice specially designed for the experience. Finally, this is analysed by artificial intelligence to create a totally personalised video with an animated lip-sync, all brought to viewers in a WhatsApp bot.
What do you want for Christmas?
This campaign aims to give a bit of optimism and happiness in spite of the current crisis, just like the children’s hope and belief in Santa Claus. The French version, #allôpapanoël, was a huge hit with over 1 million (and counting) personalised messages generated in 10 days.
If you could ask Santa Claus anything, what would it be? You can, of course, also use this number to threaten your kids to make sure they are on their best behaviour (at least until December 24th!).
So, what do you want for Christmas?
