The idea

Publicis normally makes one New Year’s film. In 2024 we made one for every employee instead. All 100,000 of them. Because making one normal film would have been suspiciously sensible.

Voluntary information from each person’s Marcel profile helped decide the language, leader, interests, jokes and generated scenarios. The result was a personal thank-you starring Arthur Sadoun, his AI twin and other Publicis leaders in situations made for the person watching.

My bit

I helped build the creative-technology pipeline behind the 100,000 films. It turned employee data into scripts, jokes, voices, AI-generated scenes and final videos in the recipient’s language. This was early generative video, when four consistent seconds could feel like a small miracle, so naturally we decided to do it 100,000 times.

Did it work?

Publicis produced a separate film for every employee, the system covered 35 languages. Publicis later used Wishes as a visible lead-in to its CoreAI strategy presentation: a useful demonstration that personalized AI production could work at Groupe scale.

Shiny things

No major creative award for this exact project has been found. Little Black Book did include the story among its most-read European work of 2024, which is lovely, but is not secretly a Lion.

People who made it happen

Publicis Groupe, Le Truc, Saatchi & Saatchi Canada, PXP, Prodigious and Harbor.

Elsewhere on the internet

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