In October 2025 we posted a nine-second video of a giant robot vacuum sweeping fall leaves off a quiet street on Mont-Royal. No paid media, no influencer, no hashtag strategy. Meta’s insights now show about 16.7 million views on Instagram and 13.3 million on Facebook, 30,000 shares, 41,000 likes, 5,000 comments and 60,000 accounts engaged. 99% of the people who saw it did not follow us. Here is exactly how it was made and what we learned.
The idea: a familiar place, one impossible detail
Everyone in a northern city has a feeling about fall leaves. The street was ordinary on purpose: houses, a hedge, a parked SUV, no landmark. The impossible detail was the scale of the vacuum. Same shape as the one under your sofa, the size of a car. A payoff at the end rewards people who watch twice.
The plate: one phone clip
The entire live-action shoot was a ten-second handheld clip of the street on an iPhone, filmed at eye level in flat autumn light. Flat light is a gift for CGI: soft shadows are easier to match than hard sun. We kept the walk slow so the camera track would be clean.
The build
- Camera tracking. The software reconstructed the phone’s path, so the vacuum stays glued to the asphalt as the camera moves.
- The model. A robot vacuum modelled in 3D with the details people recognise: the bumper, the sensor dome, the red accent, the brush skirt.
- Leaves. The part that sold it. Thousands of simulated leaves, some lifted by the vacuum’s draft, some crushed, with a clean strip left behind it.
- Lighting and shadow. A soft contact shadow under the machine and a faint reflection of the hedge in its top surface. Nobody notices these consciously. Everyone notices when they are missing.
- Sound. A low motor hum, leaf crunch, a distant car. On a phone speaker the sound does half the work of convincing you it is real.
The post
Posted as a Reel on @lenzvive and mirrored to the LenzVive Facebook page on October 22, 2025, with a plain caption and no call to action. The first 48 hours were normal. Then Facebook picked it up, and the comment section became the distribution: thousands of people tagging friends to ask whether Montréal really bought this.
The numbers, rounded
- 30M views across Instagram and Facebook
- 99% of viewers were non-followers
- 30K shares, 41K likes, 5K comments, 4K saves
- 60K accounts engaged, 1.4K new followers
- $0 media spend
What we would repeat for a client
Keep the location ordinary and recognisable. Make the product the only impossible thing in frame. Start from a real plate, never a fully generated scene. Design the sound. End on a payoff. And post natively on Facebook as well as Instagram: nearly half the reach came from there.
What it means for your brand
Replace the vacuum with your product and the street with your customer’s street. That is the whole pitch of FOOH and CGI ads: the same recipe, your logo. A launch ad is $2,500 CAD and takes two days. Send us the product and the place and we will send back the scene.
