How Dassault Systèmes reinvented the Eiffel Tower to call for sustainable innovation
Dassault Systèmes and Wunderman Thompson have won the Content and Response to Change categories at The Drum Awards for B2B. Here is the award-winning case study.
In 2022, the construction sector was responsible for 39% of global energy-related carbon emissions. This industry is particularly complex and made up of a siloed value chain with many stakeholders to coordinate. Despite this, it’s urgent to make it more sustainable. Dassault Systèmes has developed a B2B platform to offer the construction players software solutions to innovate more sustainably at each stage of the process. It allows them to collaborate, design, test, and simulate all their options before implementing them in the real world. The platform is extremely powerful and capable of addressing contemporary environmental issues. But Dassault Systèmes was just communicating about it in a very technical way (white papers, technical documentations…).
This is where we stepped in. The platform could not be told, it had to be visualized and we had to show how it works to all our B2B targets. So, to promote it to the various audiences of the construction sector, we imagined “Building Tomorrow”, an audacious project rooted in emotions and allowing them to instantly understand the platform, its advantages and all its specificities. To literally show how we could build tomorrow, we challenged a team of construction experts to imagine a more sustainable version of the Eiffel Tower. The idea? Ask them to virtually build the new tower using Dassault Systèmes cutting-edge platform. We were led by a simple motivation: to demonstrate that it is now possible to engage impactful actions with the platform that will make a great difference in the real world of Infrastructure & Cities. In fact, we created the ultimate construction B2B case study to build a better tomorrow.
The experts collaborated for 6 months to optimize every step of the construction process: ore extraction, materials, water and waste management, energy consumption, design, logistics, building, dismantling… In the end, we were able to measure the excellent results and impact of the new tower:
Contributing to fighting urban heat islands
Engaging with citizens’ needs
Developing aesthetically pleasing designs
Designing a water-positive tower
Reducing 10x the carbon footprint of its materials
Implementing disruption-resistant logistics operations
Establishing an efficient logistics plan from the beginning
Monitoring the environmental impact across the tower lifecycle
Limiting CO2 emissions and consumption of natural resources
Powering the tower with 97% of renewable energy
A 5 episodes series and various contents (expert articles, data, interviews, and conferences at construction trade shows) were created to document the project and highlight its game-changing results. Building Tomorrow has been hugely commented on and covered by the Infrastructures & Cities press & players, opening a discussion between the construction professionals about the outdated processes of today’s projects. It was a fresh, more human, and entertaining approach in a sector where B2B communication remains boring and conventional. Most importantly, it demonstrated that ecology is now compatible with construction thanks to Dassault Systèmes' platform and showed the key players the way forward to an industry.