https://www.ceelogreen.com/valentine

Alex Burford came up with a great idea for a Valentine’s Day promotion around Cee Lo Green‘s album; The Lady Killer. Following the success and popularity of Cee Lo’s lyric videos for Fuck You and It’s OK, we would allow people to create their own videos with a personal message for their Valentine.

It’s my job to make these ideas a reality, so I drew up a thorough brief for Jaco van der Walt at Etiket. After many sleepless nights he managed to get the animation as close to the lyric videos as possible, with customised text.

I requested a number of features to ensure that the app is very user-friendly.

Users enter their message, choose a style (Fuck You or It’s OK) and finally select one of three instrumental backing tracks to create a personalised video. They then have the option to email the video to their loved one or use a custom link that can be posted on social networks. Sharing a link on facebook will use a custom playback swf on a whitelisted url, allowing it to be viewed within the news feed.

Due to the highly customised nature of this campaign, it was a challenge to project manage. After a lot of testing and tweaking we finally got to a brilliant application.

I wrote some php script to dynamically generate the embed code and social meta data based on the unique querystring that personalises the video. Iwan Moore as Isle Interactive then converted the script to asp.net and integrated it into the official Cee Lo Green website.

The final result is a fun and effective Valentine’s Day promotion for The Lady Killer.