Title	THE 6 FRIENDS THEORY
Brand	ACCOR HOTELS
Product/Service	MERCURE HOTELS
Category	A02. Non-Fiction: series or film
Entrant Company	W PARIS, FRANCE
Contributing Company 2	W PARIS, FRANCE
Contributing Company	W PARIS, FRANCE
Media Agency	HAVAS MEDIA FRANCE Puteaux, FRANCE

Name	Company	Position
Antoine Dubois	Accor Hotels	vice president
Gilles Deleris	W	General Creative Director
Ivan Pierens	W	Creative Director
Lisa Weil	Accor Hotels	Brand Manager
Arnaud de Broves	Accor Hotels	Digital brand manager
Arnaud Wacker	W	Art Director
Renan Cottrel	W	Copywriter
Sebastien Henry	W	digital art director
Aurélie Léauté	W	Account Director
Cecilia Deschamps	W	Project Manager
Samy Martinez	W	Planner
Jean-Francois Julian	Windsor	Director
Sylvain Obriot	Windsor	Producer

The Campaign

The idea was inspired by the theory of 6 degrees of separation, which claims that any two people in the world may be connected by a relational chain including no more than five additional people. To test this theory in real life, Mercure undertook to connect two people who were worlds apart: the winner of an international casting call conducted on Facebook, and an Aboriginal Australian man. Anyone interested in taking part in the Six Friends event was invited to post a video expressing their personality and motivation on Mercure's Facebook page. An international jury composed of business and media experts, journalists, and influential bloggers chose the Six Friends traveler from among the 50 people whose videos had received the most votes. The winner Ludovica, a 22-year-old Italian woman, took off for a round-the-world journey whose path was traced according to where her friends and her friends' friends lived, as well as the Mercure hotel network. At each stop, she was warmly welcomed by a Mercure hotel manager who would guide her to the place where she would meet her next friend. The trip was shown on Mercure's Facebook page in a video series composed of seven 4 to 5-minute episodes. The series was promoted via traditional media, a press and e-press campaign, social media, and the Mercure website. In particular, the brand website featured a globe showing the location of all Mercure hotels. By clicking on any hotel, people could access the hotel factsheet. At every stop, Ludovica's arrival was an opportunity to showcase the hotel director's role as a guide for discovering the city. Hotel teams expressed genuine enthusiasm for the project. Extending themselves above and beyond the role they were given to play in the web series, they made a point of providing Ludovica with sincere, heart-warming, and pleasantly surprising experiences.

Our resultats are more that we expected : 600 candidates from 26 countries ; 50,000 votes ; +240,000 new Facebook fans ; 11 million views of videos ; 9.5% engagement rate ; nearly 29 million people reached. The 360° design of the operation enabled us to maximize results and effectively position the Mercure brand as connected, creative, friendly, and sensitive.

The 6 friends theory is a digital brand content campaign featuring the Mercure brand’s new positioning, “In harmony with people and places”. The campaign was designed to provide evidence of this position by featuring Mercure’s international hotel network and its hotel managers. Content tone was also a vehicle for the brand values of sincerity, emotion and surprise. Content was also designed to respond to our target’s expectations on social networks. An international competition was launched to select a winner who was subsequently to become the leading character of an original web series made up of seven 4-5 minute episodes combining the genres of documentary and fiction. Participants were all volunteers and not actors. To resume, the 6 friends theory is a transmedia campaign which blends competition, social media content, a unique storytelling technique and e-PR.