"Connecting people and technology in creative ways. This concept has since been emulated by others." —juror Jared Benson
"A person willing to do whatever the Interwebs tell him to do. How can you not love this?" —juror Adrian Belina
Overview: Leo Burnett was hosting a seminar on real-time creativity at the Cannes Advertising Festival and needed to promote it; the Leo Burnett creative team sold the festival on the idea of David on Demand—one employee giving up his free will to Twitter in return for a free trip to Cannes. David on Demand was an experiential campaign that allowed thousands of people to experience the festival through the eyes and ears of Leo Burnett Worldwide creative recruiter David Perez. It seamlessly integrated Justin.tv, Facebook and Twitter with the USTREAM feed to make the experience happen, but the core concept, that arose from a single question, became much more important than the execution: How would the Internet treat a man who had to do everything he was told?
• From idea to development, the project involved four production partners and took twelve weeks to execute.
• David received 20,000 requests, among them, he was asked to pole dance, get a Fail Whale tattoo, drink from his shoe, get a lightning bolt haircut and have a pillow fight.
• In under 6 days, David on Demand generated 3 million mentions on Twitter from more than 132 countries, 144 hours of live streaming content and over 100 million impressions from related articles and live television appearances.
Comments by Ryan Wagman/Nuno Ferreira:
Were there any specific demands that made the project easier or harder? "David on Demand was the most difficult project we've been a part of. Foremost because it really was live; the tweets that came in—from tattoos, to haircuts, to paragliding—came from real people. If David responded to a tweet, success, that person loved the project. If David couldn't respond to a tweet because it was illegal, or physically impossible, or just because he received over 20,000 tweets and couldn't respond to all of them, then, failure, that person hated the project. It was pass/fail every minute of every day for six days, which made it the most stressful six days of our lives. But it was also a great study in human nature. We thought DoD would end up being overrun by the ugly anonymous underbelly of the Internet—people who would just keep tweeting for him to jump off a ledge or drink a can of paint—but that didn't happen. For the most part, David was treated kindly. People just wanted to interact with him. Have him say hello or write their names in the sand. It was shocking, really. In the best possible way."
