It’s a question all of us have pondered: do I have a doppelganger? Cleverly plugging into that innate narcissism, Crispin Porter + Bogusky created the Facebook Facial Profiler app for Coke Zero, which scours the social network for your dead ringer, tying smartly into Coke Zero’s verisimilitude to Coke.

As of December 2009, users logging into Facebook could allow the app to gather photos from their profile and add additional images to help hone the search. The application then scans their facial features – shape, skin tone, features – and filters the database of those who’ve signed up, giving you the results with a percentage of likeness score. You can then choose to share the results with your Facebook friends or check out and vote on a gallery of the likenesses that the app has found.

“We wanted to develop an intriguing idea that could be shared virally, and we know that our consumers are very active in the social media space,” says Linda Cronin, director of media and interactive communications for Coca-Cola North America. “So, how do you provide a thing of value to consumers so they think it’s fun, as much fun as the brand itself, and encourage them to share? We felt this could have legs for the social media space.”

Crispin’s latest Facebook venture comes after the success of its Whopper Sacrifice app for Burger King. The Facial Profiler is a similarly insightful and  savvy use of social media. “We’re taught from when we’re kids that we’re all unique, that there’s no one like us, we’re one of a kind,” says creative director Dave Schiff from Crispin’s Boulder, CO office. “Then to [suggest] that there might be someone out there who looks just like you, it’s very uncomfortable and intriguing and fascinating. I think that’s ultimately what drove people to sign up for this thing; that’s a huge cultural tension to tap into.”

The ambitious project was pitched four years ago and has been 18 months in development, says interactive creative director Jeff Benjamin. “It was one of those ideas where we sold it and you come back and say, ‘Oh my God, we sold it, how are we going to make this?’ I don’t think I’ve ever been that scared.”

An early concern for the project, says Cronin, was keeping on the right side of Facebook’s strict privacy rules (which Whopper Sacrifice had fallen foul of) and creating a system that actually worked with a completely new piece of software.

Benjamin and Cronin are coy about the details, but say that the app was developed over a four-month period from licensed facial recognition software used by the US Department of Homeland Security and military. Creative director Alex Burnard says that one of the biggest hurdles was building the imprecision of human perception into the programming. “[This kind of software] is designed to find you in a batch of other people – specifically you. But we weren’t looking to find you; we were trying to find you, light. It was hard adapting the software to do that.”

You ‘light’ meant taking into account human factors that a machine might overlook, adds Schiff. “You could nail the facial structure, but people have a vibe, and that vibe can be bangs or what kind of glasses you wear.” To account for that and calibrate results more accurate from a human perspective, viewers vote on how good likenesses are. These are then added to the software’s matches to create an amalgam database of both criteria.

It wasn’t all plain sailing though. Despite six months of R&D, in-house and with contractors and researchers, the project stalled after the first software failed to bring up close enough matches, says Burnard. “The earlier technology didn’t allow for growth or for matches to get better, so we had to have a rethink.” Media plans were put on hold as the team developed different technology.

Central to the success of the project was a big database from which to search for matches, says Benjamin. Potential dead ringers were recruited through a simple banner campaign and tested when they had 20,000 users. That yielded nowhere near close enough matches, so after a further push they retested with 100,000 users, which turned out to be a critical mass. “That’s where we saw about 15% of people got a pretty much identical match,” says Benjamin. At time of press the database was at 288,000 users in 140 countries and 14 languages with users spending over five minutes on the site.

Having created a completely novel visual form of communication, the team say they have left the next step unformed, leaving some delightfully provocative questions: “There are no rules for how to interact with someone who looks like you, and I think that’s where the tension comes in,” points out Schiff. “How are you supposed to act? We’ve left it undefined on purpose, because the best campaigns and work we’ve done, you put something out there and it becomes a larger conversation between pop culture and the brand.” Q

www.cpbgroup.com