
#YOUDRIVE / Brand and A-Class
Mercedes-Benz
Issue 25 | December 2012
Agency
AMVBBDO
Creative Team
Martin Loraine, Steve Jones
Production Team
TV Producer: Rebecca Scharf Digital Producer: Ian Whittle Production Company: Stink Production Company Producers: Blake Powell, Paula Garr Post Production Company: The Mill
Other Credits
Director: Yann Demange DOP: Anthony Dod Mantle
Date
October 2012
Background
A belief that Mercedes-Benz cars are for rich, middle aged executives was preventing young drivers from considering the brand.
That was a problem when launching the new A-Class, a small hatchback positioned at 30-something drivers.
Central to the thinking was the belief that if a brand wants to be perceived differently, it needs to behave differently. So, the agency set out to take the brand experience to a new generation of prospective Mercedes-Benz driver by developing an interactive multimedia launch campaign named #YOUDRIVE which put the viewer at the heart of the action.
Idea
To launch the new Mercedes-Benz to a wider and younger target market, an innovative ‘event’ TV campaign for the new A-Class was developed, driven by the audience via Twitter – a global first.
The campaign exploited the fact that the UK has more ‘dual-screen’ viewers than any other country in Europe. Using Twitter, TV viewers could drive the action of the three-part story during the commercial breaks in the X Factor.
Kano’s social graph helped the brand tap into his highly influential celebrity network.
Reach was extended with MSN, Yahoo!, Spotify and YouTube home-page takeovers.
A cover wrap of the Evening Standard, personalised posters sent via social media, video on demand pre-roll, O2 and Vodafone network ads and Facebook reach blocks extended reach still further.
Alternative narrative plots were posted to a YouTube channel immediately following broadcast.
All subsequent activity pointed to the YouTube channel.
Results
‘#YOUDRIVE’ appeared 103m times on Twitter and 30m times on Facebook
The number of people tweeting on Saturday night about #YOUDRIVE was 6% of the total number of people tweeting anything about #xfactor.
Twitter reported the campaign to have achieved the highest number of trend impressions of any campaigns during 2012.
400% increase in organic A-Class related search terms five minutes after broadcast.
An average seeded video CTR of over 3% and an average completion rate of 94%.
Mercedes-Benz website visits increased 17%.
Brochure requests increased 142%.
Our Thoughts
Last year AKQA won Golds all over the shop with Star Player for Heineken, opening up what I thought would be a flood of multi-screen engagements. But there has only been a trickle. Typical Abbott Mead Vickers, though, to map how people are using technology and to want to get in there and mix it with them.
How a great big traditional agency has turned itself into a great big digitally-savvy communications agency is a story waiting to be told. When it is, it will provide a survival guide for many other agencies who are struggling to be relevant in this time of accelerating change.