How Entourage Made a Homeless Avatar the Face of Real Inequality
Entourage's 'Will, the first homeless person in Metaverse' is a 2022 French public service campaign created by TBWA\Paris that places a homeless avatar named Will inside virtual metaverse environments to expose the social isolation experienced by precarious populations in France, drawing a deliberate and unsettling contrast between accelerating investment in virtual worlds and the enduring invisibility of those living without shelter.
The campaign launched on 31 March 2022, a date chosen with precision. In France, 31 March marks the end of the annual winter emergency-accommodation period, the point at which the state's cold-weather shelter obligations formally expire and thousands of precarious individuals return to the streets. Entourage — a community of 150,000 committed citizens dedicated to combating relational exclusion — used this institutional deadline as a springboard, timing the release of Will to land on the eve of the French presidential election and direct public and political attention toward a crisis it described as unprecedented in its scale.
Will himself is presented as a fully rendered three-dimensional avatar, homeless not in the streets of Paris but in the gleaming virtual architectures of the metaverse. The conceptual tension is direct: as major corporations and political campaigns in France accelerated their investment in virtual worlds during early 2022, social isolation among the country's most precarious populations had, by Entourage's account, never been stronger. Will functions simultaneously as a creative provocation and a spokesperson — what Le Figaro described as an 'incarnation visible des invisibles', a visible embodiment of the invisible, according to Le Figaro's coverage in June 2022. The campaign reached audiences as an integrated media work containing a primary video asset, distributed through digital and social channels across the French market and reported internationally by The Drum as Ad of the Day on 4 April 2022. Clapboard rates this campaign 79 out of 100.
Entourage identified a specific cultural contradiction at the heart of early 2022 French public life. Political candidates and major brands were publicly staking claims inside metaverse platforms, framing virtual-world investment as a marker of progress and modernity, while the lived reality of social isolation among homeless and precarious communities in France remained structurally unchanged and largely absent from mainstream debate. TBWA\Paris built the campaign's entire strategic logic around this contradiction, using the language and aesthetics of digital optimism to make visible what that optimism routinely displaced.
The competitive landscape for public attention in France's charitable and public-interest sector is dense. Organisations including Emmaüs Solidarité and the Fondation Abbé Pierre operate large-scale communications programmes addressing housing precarity and homelessness, commanding established public recognition and media relationships. Against these entrenched voices, Entourage — whose 2019 predecessor campaign 'Tendre la main', also produced by TBWA\Paris, used print and outdoor media to encourage app downloads and symbolic solidarity — needed a different register entirely. According to reporting by Business Ladn Eu and leclubdesda.org, the 2022 campaign represented a deliberate escalation in creative ambition and media strategy, moving from metaphorical representation of loneliness to direct cultural intervention. Emmaüs Solidarité reported assisting 15,177 people in 2022 and recorded 2,598 people without shelter, according to Emmaüs Solidarité's published figures, framing the scale of the challenge Entourage was attempting to make legible. The strategic insight was not simply that homelessness required more coverage, but that society's capacity for fraternity — real human connection — was itself in crisis, and that the metaverse boom provided an unusually sharp mirror in which to reflect that crisis back at a French public preparing to vote.
TBWA\Paris constructed Will as a photorealistic three-dimensional homeless avatar, designed to inhabit metaverse environments with the same visual grammar those platforms use to project aspiration and novelty. The creative decision to meet the metaverse on its own aesthetic terms — rather than to satirise or crudely parody it — gave the campaign an unsettling coherence. Will does not look like a protest gesture; he looks like he belongs in the virtual world and is excluded from it anyway, which was precisely the point.
The campaign was directed by Executive Creative Directors Benjamin Marchal and Faustin Claverie, with art direction by Morgane Alexandre and Sébastien Skrzypczak. Strategic planning was led by Léa Rivoire and Emmanuel Sabbagh, whose framing of the fraternity crisis shaped the campaign's conceptual architecture. Account management was handled by Frédéric Jacquard and Julia Montagu. Post-production was executed by Else, with Younes Chekouh serving as Head of 3D — the role most directly responsible for Will's visual realisation — and Séverine Damolini as Head of Post-Production. Music was composed by Olivier Lefebvre, who also served as Head of Music and Sound, with sound direction by Ambroise Cabry and music art direction by Thomas Jacquet. The depth of the production roster reflects the campaign's ambition to function as a credible cultural object rather than a tactical charity appeal.
E-marketing.fr, in coverage published on 31 March 2022, positioned the campaign within a broader 'anti-metaverse' communications trend emerging in France at that moment, according to E-marketing.fr, suggesting that TBWA\Paris had identified and moved quickly on a cultural aperture that other agencies had not yet occupied. The integrated format — centred on a single primary video asset — concentrated the campaign's impact rather than diffusing it, allowing Will's presence in the virtual world to function as both the creative idea and the media strategy simultaneously. Culture-rp.com and wedemain.fr noted the campaign's resonance with French audiences attuned to questions of social solidarity, according to their respective coverage of the work.
Will, the first homeless person in Metaverse earned a Bronze Lion in the Brand Experience and Activation category at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity 2022, according to Cannes Lions records. The campaign subsequently received a Gold Award in the Social Media category at The One Show 2023, according to The One Show, and was listed in the Media category at D&AD 2023, according to D&AD, with the specific award level not publicly confirmed at the time of writing.
The Drum named Will Ad of the Day on 4 April 2022, as reported by The Drum's senior reporter Chris Sutcliffe, and included the work in its Ads of the Week listing on 6 April 2022, according to The Drum. Le Figaro published analysis of the campaign in June 2022, framing Will as an 'incarnation visible des invisibles' and questioning whether metaverse platforms could themselves intensify patterns of exclusion, according to Le Figaro. Lareclame.fr also documented the campaign's reception within the French creative industry, according to lareclame.fr.
No independently verified performance data — such as reach figures, donation uplifts, or volunteer recruitment numbers — for the Will campaign is publicly available at the time of writing. What the award record does confirm is that the campaign achieved rare cross-disciplinary recognition: a Cannes Lions in experiential activation, a One Show Gold in social media, and D&AD recognition in media, indicating that industry juries read Will as structurally effective across multiple creative and strategic dimensions simultaneously. For a public-interest organisation operating without commercial advertising budgets, that concentration of recognition represents a meaningful measure of the campaign's cultural leverage in France and internationally.
'Will, the first homeless person in Metaverse' is a 2022 French public service campaign by Entourage, created by TBWA\Paris. It places a three-dimensional homeless avatar named Will inside metaverse environments to expose social isolation among precarious populations in France, launching on 31 March 2022 to coincide with the end of France's winter emergency-accommodation period.
Entourage launched Will in the metaverse to expose a cultural contradiction. In early 2022, major brands and French presidential candidates were investing in virtual worlds while social isolation among homeless populations intensified. TBWA\Paris placed Will inside those same virtual spaces to make the contrast between digital optimism and real-world exclusion impossible to ignore.
The Will campaign won a Bronze Lion in Brand Experience and Activation at Cannes Lions 2022, according to Cannes Lions records. It also received a Gold Award in Social Media at The One Show 2023, according to The One Show, and was listed in the Media category at D&AD 2023, according to D&AD.
Will was created by TBWA\Paris for the French nonprofit Entourage. Executive Creative Directors Benjamin Marchal and Faustin Claverie led the creative team. Art directors Morgane Alexandre and Sébastien Skrzypczak shaped the visual work, and Head of 3D Younes Chekouh was responsible for the avatar's photorealistic construction, with post-production by Else.
The campaign addresses social isolation and relational exclusion among homeless and precarious people in France. Entourage, a community of 150,000 committed citizens, used Will to highlight that France's crisis of fraternity persists year-round, not only during the winter emergency-accommodation period that ends each 31 March under French state policy.
Entourage timed the Will campaign to launch on the eve of the 2022 French presidential election, a moment when metaverse investment had entered political campaign discourse. By placing a homeless avatar inside those same virtual worlds, TBWA\Paris directed electoral attention toward the social isolation crisis that political conversations about digital progress were systematically leaving behind.
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