The Chanel No5 homepage takeover by FEED & Hi-ReS! (creative) and MEC Global (media) recently won Eyeblaster’s International People’s Choice Award. This post is part of a series of interviews with award nominees for a behind-the-scenes look at some of the best campaigns from 2009. Thanks to FEED Managing Director Rob Armstrong for sharing his insights on the campaign.

A lot has been written about the making of the Chanel No5 campaign with Audrey Tautou. What was FEED’s role in the campaign?

We worked on the online element of the campaign and that meant getting creative live on 18 MSN country home pages in 11 different languages and simultaneously on the MSN TODAY channel over the course of a day. To achieve that we worked closely with Hi Res! who supplied the beautiful graphics, MEC the French agency and brand guardians of Chanel, the team from MSN who flew over from Redmond to work with us, and the Eyeblaster London team.

What was the overall response to the campaign? Was it different than you expected?
I think we always knew that, if executed well, it was going to be a campaign that generated a lot of interest. Chanel is an iconic brand with an artistically rich heritage, so we felt all along that the sheer scale of the camapign and the quality of the assets and animation meant that it was going to turn heads. The numbers were great: 651,640,641 impressions over a 24 hour period; the interaction rate was 58.54%

Why do you think the campaign generated so much interest?
For a start it was Chanel’s first foray into digital advertising and as a brand when they do something people stand up and take notice. When your starting point involves such beautiful assets your job is made much easier; the public are immediately curious and want to interact with them.

What were the challenges in putting together the launch of a online global campaign of this nature?
The technical structure of the ad itself itself was complex, involving seven flash panels in total. Each of these panels required several pieces of custom coding. When you factor in the page pushdown it was an intricate piece of work and we had to work closely with MSN’s team in Redmond to ensure that however complex it got the cpu load was never too high and there was no danger of anything crashing their homepages globally.

A campaign of this size always involves lots of brand stakeholders in different timezones so sign off becomes a long and tiring process, but I guess the largest challenge was putting live so many different campaigns. The home pages all went live at midnight local country time so we literally had waves of countries within the same timezones going live and then feeding back to us over a 24 hour period. Add to that the fact it was a public holiday in the UK and it’s fair to describe that day as challenging!

What’s the next big thing for FEED?
Well, we’ve had an exciting year working with lot of interesting people on all sorts of things, while continuing to expand. Another year like this would be very welcome – a mix of different projects, amazing clients and opportunities to do more and more challenging work within the medium!

Congratulations to the FEED team