Miele HydroClean: the building that cleaned itself, on 81 screens across four countries

The brief

In spring 2026, Miele’s Western Europe team was launching HydroClean, an oven that cleans itself. The feature was new to consumers, so the campaign had one job: make people understand it in seconds, on screens they walk past.

The plan was digital out-of-home across four countries (France, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands), bought through Publicis, mostly in 10-second slots, with social media alongside. Miele’s brief to us was clear:

• One strong moment, not a story. An instant hook that grabs attention in the first seconds.
• Premium and surreal at the same time. Bold, but on brand.
• The self-cleaning has to be obvious. Real grease, real foam, yet an image that stays pleasant to look at.
• Miele visible from the very first frame.
• One idea that works on every format, horizontal and vertical.

We presented a first round of ideas on 3 April. Miele’s feedback pushed us further into a surreal, product-first direction, and the concept was validated on 13 April. Production started on 10 April.

The idea

We built a European facade in CGI, the kind of building you could find in Paris, Brussels or Amsterdam, and made it behave like an oven. Workers appear at the windows, the door in the middle of the building opens on a dirty oven, the HydroClean cycle runs, foam and steam do the work, and the oven ends clean. The tagline lands with the result: in French, “Vous nettoyez encore… Pourquoi ? Les fours Miele avec HydroClean.”

A few choices that came out of the review rounds with Miele:

• A building with square windows. It scales from a small mall screen to a whole facade without losing the illusion, and it does not point to any one city, so the same scene works in all four markets.
• A bespoke oven display. Instead of a countdown clock (which would suggest the oven is idle), the display shows only the HydroClean icon and name.
• The Miele logo as a persistent overlay, present from frame one rather than only on the end card.
• Three times ten seconds rather than one thirty-second film. On a street screen, attention windows are short. Three punchy exposures of the same message in the same airtime beat one long story.
• No fake loop. The oven starts dirty and ends clean, so the film ends on a clean end card instead of pretending to loop.

Production, in numbers

• 1 concept, full CGI, no shoot
• 4 countries: France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Netherlands
• 5 languages: French, Dutch, Flemish, German, English
• 81 screens in 76 cities
• 300+ versions: 6, 10 and 30-second cuts, portrait and landscape, per screen, per language
• Social cuts in 9:16, 1:1 and 2:3, plus TikTok-ready assets and in-store screen versions
• Two revision rounds per stage, from storyboard to animation

Every screen came with its own spec sheet, from the Digital Dream, Caumartin and Opéra screens in Paris to the Meir in Antwerp, Rue Neuve in Brussels, Veldstraat in Ghent and Cloche d’Or in Luxembourg. Each one got a version built for its exact layout, resolution and frame rate, delivered directly to the media owners. Some screens had blind spots (an escalator, a window frame) and got a version with nothing important placed there.

Delivery ran through May, and the campaign went live at the start of June 2026.

The social version

The same idea got a mixed-reality film for social: the building placed in a real Paris street, filmed as if it were there, in five languages and three formats (9:16, 1:1, 2:3). That is the version made to travel beyond the screens, so the campaign reaches the people who never walked past it. See the project.

What we learned on the street

Once the screens were live, Miele’s media team shared their first learnings, and they match ours:

• Check each location for how the creative translates before booking it.
• Only very high-resolution screens. Not every billboard is equal, and a quality check with the media agency is worth it.
• Do a control round on day one: is everything running, no technical errors?
• Take more time on the copy for readability. On the 6-second cut we extended the tagline after the first days live.

On our side, we now keep a shared tracker of every validated screen with its spec sheet, and a delivery document per media owner and per country.

What the client said

“What you have accomplished is truly impressive, and you should be very proud of the results. Congratulations on a job exceptionally well done.”

Nathalie Dubois, Head of Brand Marketing, Media & Comms Western Europe, Miele

The same team then introduced us to their colleagues in Japan. Miele Japan’s campaign, in Shinjuku, went live at the end of August 2026.