B2B & Industry

2,900 Employees Across 28 Locations — Global Employer Branding for Allianz Global Investors

On International Purpose Day, Allianz Global Investors activated 2,900 employees across 28 international locations at the same time — without shipping a single physical terminal. Through the UpReach Virtual Booth, captures from every office ran in the browser, with AI background removal into brand-aligned worlds and an average interaction time of 52 seconds per participant. A live mosaic streamed the emerging images together into a global artwork in real time. Global reach with no logistics effort.

More than 200 B2B brands from across Europe trust UpReach — from agencies to enterprise corporations.

The initial situation

Allianz Global Investors wanted to use International Purpose Day as a unifying moment for its entire globally distributed workforce. The strategic challenge: 2,900 employees across 28 locations, in different time zones, languages and cultures, were to be invited to the same activity — as one company.

A physical activation per location is out of the question at this scale. 28 hardware setups, 28 logistics chains, 28 local support teams — the effort would be out of all proportion to the communicative output. At the same time, a plain "employee takes a selfie and posts it" activity does not meet the bar for a global Purpose Day event: it lacks the shared moment, the shared artefact.

On the data protection side, there is the added complication that employee photos are captured in a regulated asset-management environment — GDPR-compliant, with clearly documented consent and a data processing agreement (DPA) agreed with the legal department.

The UpReach solution

UpReach delivered the activation through the Virtual Booth — browser-based, with no hardware logistics. Employees at each of the 28 locations opened a link on a smartphone or laptop, took a photo of themselves and received, in real time, an image integrated into the Allianz Global Investors brand design. The AI background removal ran through the Virtual Booth platform; every capture only happened after active consent, and processing was GDPR-compliant and backed by a DPA.

The software interface ran fully in the Allianz Global Investors corporate identity: branded screens, curated brand worlds as backgrounds, themed filters and stickers for Purpose Day. Employees could choose between several background motifs and shape their own brand experience — from the Tokyo office to Frankfurt.

The central lever: a live mosaic stream. Every capture from every location flowed in real time into a global live artwork, visible to all employees on a single URL. No one waited for a post-event edit — the mosaic grew in front of the workforce.

After the event, the finished mosaic could be downloaded by all participants as a high-resolution keepsake. More on the technology: /produkte/virtual-booth.

Setup & Logistics

Four weeks' lead time: 2 weeks for the UI configuration in the Allianz Global Investors corporate identity (screens, brand worlds, Purpose Day filters), 1 week for the live mosaic back end (stream architecture, automatic image composition, caching strategy for 28 time-shifted sessions), 1 week of internal communications preparation (multi-language onboarding mailing to all 2,900 employees, instructions in several languages).

No physical delivery, no set-up, no on-site staff — the Virtual Booth ran fully browser-based on the employees' own devices. That eliminated 28 logistics chains and the associated CO2, cost and coordination effort.

During the global activation phase, UpReach monitored stream performance and load in real time. The live mosaic updated continuously as employees confirmed their images. The Allianz Global Investors internal communications team could follow global progress live and weave it into internal comms — "we're now at 1,200 employees from 21 locations".

Results by the numbers

2.900

employees activated

locations synchronised globally

seconds average interaction time

2,900 employees activated across 28 locations in a single day — with classic employer-branding activations at internal touchpoints, activation rates are typically in the low single-digit percentages. The combination of low-barrier browser access, high-quality AI output and the pull of the live mosaic lifted participation well above the level of classic internal mailing campaigns.

52 seconds of average interaction time per employee is a strong figure in an employer-branding context. It means active engagement with the brand world, filters and personal image design — not just a fleeting click.

The live mosaic output was the core artefact: a lasting visual record of Purpose Day, reused in the following months as an asset for internal comms, intranet posts and onboarding material.

Key takeaways from this setup

A virtual booth beats a hardware setup at global scale: as soon as an activity needs to reach more than around 5 locations simultaneously, the economics tip clearly towards a browser-based solution. 28 hardware setups would not only be more expensive — they would be barely coordinable in operational terms.

The shared artefact is the lever: a plain "take selfies with a filter" activity does not meet the bar for a global Purpose Day. The live mosaic turns 2,900 individual actions into a single visible whole — and creates the moment of connection the occasion calls for.

Browser and GDPR are not a contradiction: implemented correctly, with explicit consent, a DPA and a configurable deletion concept, the Virtual Booth can be used even in a regulated financial-services environment. The deciding factor is a clean pre-production phase with data protection sign-off before roll-out.