Orange’s 20th Anniver­sary Cel­e­bra­tions have seen the inno­v­a­tive French telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions oper­a­tor launch #future­self. A per­son­alised, inter­ac­tive microsite that lets con­sumers see and talk to an avatar of their future selves.

French telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions oper­a­tor Orange cel­e­brat­ed their 20th anniver­sary Sept 9. In addi­tion to light­ing up the streets of Paris, the brand shared the fes­tiv­i­ties with their fol­low­ers around the world with a range of con­tent ini­tia­tives under the hash­tag #Orange20.

Hap­py birth­day @orange ! cc @Orange_France #Orange20 pic.twitter.com/MA9alZ3uCp — Manon Bar­bay (@mbarbay) Sep­tem­ber 9, 2014

The most excit­ing anniver­sary con­tent from Orange was the rolling out of #future­self, an inter­ac­tive microsite that lets users see and talk to a dig­i­tal appari­tion of their future selves.

(Incred­i­ble like­ness right?)

The con­tent, cre­at­ed by Pub­li­cis Con­seil and Jam3, allows users to upload an image of them­selves, which is then processed by advanced facial recog­ni­tion fil­ters and aged exact­ly 20 years. Users can ask their future selves any­thing they want and their dig­i­tal avatars, pow­ered by Google and AT&T speech APIs, will respond.

(Appar­ent­ly I have 14 kids, and am no good at golf. I am how­ev­er a dab hand at ‘Ju-fish-su’.)

For Orange, it sends out the sub­tle mes­sage to cus­tomers that they’ll still be there for us in 20 years, and also rein­forces the brand’s tra­di­tion­al opti­mism and sense of future. (Remem­ber their old brand tagline: “The future’s bright, the future’s Orange.”)

Celebrating The Moment, And The Future

Orange’s brief for Pub­li­cis Con­seil and Jam3 was to refresh their pub­lic per­cep­tion as an inno­va­tor of mobile telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions, as well as appeal­ing to a younger demo­graph­ic, who see the brand as “his­tor­i­cal”.

Cecile Leje­une, Account Direc­tor for Pub­li­cis Con­seil revealed the mean­ing behind the #Orange20 cam­paigns in an inter­view with Digi­day:

“Orange is def­i­nite­ly well known for its posi­tion in the telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions field, but a bit less for the role the brand plays in the inno­va­tion field. The brief from the client was to under­line that role and try to appeal to the younger demo­graph­ic, who think of the brand as a ‘his­tor­i­cal one’ ”.

Personalized Interactive Content

The #future­self cam­paign expe­ri­enced has proven quite pop­u­lar, receiv­ing 350,000 vis­i­tors in its first week, accord­ing to Pub­li­cis Con­seil. In many respects, the cam­paign played its cards right from the start; per­son­al­ized inter­ac­tive con­tent is both incred­i­bly engag­ing, and incred­i­bly share­able.

Recent years have giv­en us ‘Take a Plane Down Your Street’ from British Air­ways, which let users type in their post­code and see a 747 roll down their street cour­tesy of the Google Street View API, and ‘Mix Off’ from Talk Talk, which broad­cast clips and videos of users danc­ing on TV spots dur­ing screen­ings of the X Fac­tor. There was also Nike’s ‘Write the Future’ cam­paign dur­ing the 2010 World Cup in South Africa which embla­zoned user tweets on the top of a 90m JoBurg sky­scraper.

All of these exam­ples offer users a per­son­al­ized, inter­ac­tive expe­ri­ence that both pro­gress­es and rein­forces the val­ues of the brand. With #future­self still trend­ing well on social media, Orange have every rea­son to con­tin­ue cel­e­brat­ing.