Evian’s Dancing Babies

Evian is a French brand of mineral water that is owned by the Danone Group. The water proceeds from several natural sources located close to the town of Évian-les-bains in the French Alps. Its low sodium content and balanced mineral composition make it particularly well suited for mothers and babies.

Evian launched the “Live Young” campaign in 2009 with the help of the French advertising agency BETC Euro RSCG. The campaign was online based and involved the use of social networking sites, a “Live Young” community, several webpages and most importantly a viral video called “Roller Babies”. “Roller Babies” became the world’s most-viewed brand video, as it achieved a Guinness world record of 75 million views and was shared almost 2.2 million times.

The video is focused around dancing and rollerblading babies, supported by an appealing soundtrack and the message that Evian water has a vitalizing and rejuvenating effect on your body. Additionally, Evian created a web appearance centered around the “Roller Babies”, providing users with different contents such as the possibility to download the soundtrack or setting the babies as your wallpaper. To establish further touch points with consumers, Evian created Facebook profiles for the babies that appear in the video, which allowed fans to befriend them and indirectly also befriend the Evian brand.

Live Young web appearance

The "Roller Babies" video:

The success of the viral video, in terms of online views and social media shares routes back to several factors.

1. People have a natural aversion against anything that tries to convince or persuade them to do something. When the company’s logo is displayed too often and too obviously, consumers are discouraged and don’t pay further attention to the information they are receiving. In the case of the “Roller Babies” video, a technique called Brand Pulsing is applied which means the brand and logo only appear a few times and are included in a very subtle and indirect way. This ensures that the story of the video is interesting for consumers even without the image of the brand.

2. The video is exciting from the very beginning; the first emotions that are established are joy as well as surprise. This incentivizes the viewer to continue watching the video.

3. The way the video is presented is delightful and pleasant; it is surprising but not shocking. This means it fulfills the criteria that allow the video to be shared easily with friends. Consumers will hesitate to share a video that is too scandalous, so even though such a video might attract attention, it will not be as successful as a well-balanced one.

Baby T-Shirts

To conclude, the above factors had a positive influence in the enormous success of Evian’s “Live Young” campaign, led by the “Roller Babies” video. The campaign was so successful online, that as a result Evian started to push the concept back into the real world, by using billboards, interactive video screens at bus stops and a line of t-shirts with baby pictures.

Interactive touch screen with dancing baby at a bus stop

Evian Billboard

Two years after the worldwide success of the “Roller Babies” commercial, Evian announced recently the re-launch of the “Live Young” campaign. The new “Baby Inside” video is once again hosted on youtube and reasserts Evian’s “vision of youth as a positive, universal value that everyone shares”. This time, consumers have a chance to become part of the campaign by uploading their own video, dancing to a new soundtrack in an Evian baby t-shirt.

The new "Baby Inside" video: