Presentation

Description

BETC is a French advertising agency founded in Paris in 1995. The agency notably designed campaigns for clients such as Air France, Evian, Lacoste and Canal+, and was voted as the most creative agency for eight consecutive years. BETC belongs to Havas group, a French multinational advertising and public relations company. Here we are focusing on BETC FULLSIX, the entity which gathers Havas group’s digital services and resources.

Digital activity

BETC FULLSIX’s digital activity consists of CRM, e-commerce and various platforms and websites production and many digital objects and experiences. It brings together 600 talents, including more than 200 engineers and data scientists as well as more than 200 creatives, service designers and advising experts in digital and digital transformation projects.

Good practice targeted

Environmental

To go further

https://betc.com/fr/

Good practice

In order to present their annual CSR report, initially published in paper form, BETC chose to use an eco-designed website and mainly worked on the frugality of its content in order to lighten its weight. The website is powered by a bike in a sport hall, thanks to a Raspberry Pi server which batteries are powered by pedal force, duplicated by a windgenerator engine. Users are also advised of the weight of every content, calculated by The Shift Project’s Carbonalyser.

Costs

not much, only time

Starting date of the good practice

end of 2019

Time to implement the good practice

1 year but it could have been less, there was delay due to the lockdown periods

Tools/partners/suppliers of the good practice

• CMS Prismic to contribute on the content which was then stratifed to be hosted on the Raspberry Pi
• Raspberry Pi
• Bike
• Windgenerator engine in order to duplicate pedal force
Partenaires :
• Wellness sport hall

Lara Jane Lelièvre, Project Director – BETC FULLSIX

What are the benefits of the project ?

The main benefit of this project is the learning of the creative and technical team in terms of eco-design and development of a low carbon experience.
We had two challenges on this project:
- Challenge our interface designers to come up with a radically low-carbon site concept, while maintaining our approach as communicators and storytellers.
- Challenge our technical approach by experimenting with the most frugal hosting possible.
This project remains above all an experiment and is not a solution to the problem of digital pollution. It is not possible to host all the sites on Raspberry Pi, otherwise we would destroy the planet. It is used to participate in the competition towards more digital sobriety in our lives.
This project also gave us the opportunity to collaborate with multiple expertises of the agency, and in particular BETC DESIGN: from the prototype to the production of the final pedal server, the designers allowed us to continuously improve the object by proposing, for example, eco-responsible and sustainable materials.

What were the constraints faced by the company ?

An internal project remains a lower priority than customer projects. It took us 1 year to get this project out of the ground. The organizational constraint was therefore the main constraint to overcome.
The second one is the technical constraints linked to the rigor required by the production of an eco-responsible site. For example, the management of the weight of the images required a lot of work to find creative alternatives. We have graphically reprocessed all the contents of the CSR report in 3 forms:
- Treatment of the diagrams in CSS
- Processing of logos and small visuals in bi-chromatic
- Processing of illustrations in wireframe

Which advice would give to another company ?

The training of its teams in digital eco-responsibility is important to break certain habits and acquire the right reflexes.

What are the next steps?

Thanks to the experience of several digital projects applying the best practices in eco-design, we are currently formalizing an offer for internal and external use, which will allow the agency's designers and producers to strengthen their skills on a verified work methodology, and our clients to benefit from our expertise on the subject.