brand-e

By Simon Fuller. You can get people talking with an evocative piece of branded entertainment. But to make that branded entertainment really grab the eyeballs, you often need an eye-catching star. Someone like burlesque dancer and fetish model Dita Von Teese, who has been deployed by water brand Perrier to make its latest campaign fizz.
Perrier has rolled out an interactive mini-site, PerrierByDita, set in a huge mansion, with the visitor exploring darkened hallways and rooms from a first-person perspective. There’s just one other person in the house, and that is none other than Miss Von Teese herself, on seductive form.
“[Towards] an objective of attracting younger people and developing its online presence, Perrier wanted to create something special around its partnership with Dita Von Teese,” says Thomas Christiaen, account director at Ogilvy & Mather Paris, which put together the campaign in collaboration with production company B-Reel.
“The aim was for Perrier to propose an unique experience to the consumer and generate conversations around the brand. The risqué is part of Perrier’s DNA: Perrier has always been daring in communication but always remains subtle and elegant. Perrier is not a shy brand, she tends to be on the edge, and that’s what has always helped generate conversations around all Perrier communications.”
So, why Ms Von Teese?
“From a digital and content standpoint we were seeking someone with true ‘talk value’,” says Frederic Levron, head of digital and content at Ogilvy & Mather Paris. “Someone with enough charisma to inspire great storytelling.”
“She’s literally a living symbol of Perrier, sharing with the brand [the] common values of elegance, cutting-edge and sexiness,” says Christiaen.
Site visitors get to douse themselves in branded entertainment, since PerrierByDita boasts 20 minutes of interactive video experiences. These include deciding in which order you explore the mysterious mansion of the site, through to rolling the dice in the mansion’s lounge to decide your fate. And Dita is on hand throughout, glamorous and titillating as ever.
“The concept of this brand entertainment experiment is motivated by an ambition to go beyond content in which you are just a spectator, to put you in the heart of the action and make you the content player,” says Levron. “We have tried… to bring together all of the knowledge of Ogilvy – this combines our experience in film with the new opportunities of the Internet.”
brand-e: classy and engaging content for the discerning water drinker