MINI maps
MINI France
Issue 23 | May 2012
Agency
DDB Paris
Creative Team
Executive Creative Director: Alexandre Hervé ; Copywriter: Alexis Benbehe, Pierre Mathonat ; Art Director: Alexis Benbehe, Pierre Mathonat
Production Team
Agency Producer: Guillaume Cossou ; Motion Design: Julien Taillez (DDB) ; Web Supervisor: Vannha Vincent (DDB) ; Technical Director: Michael Paquereau, Brice Aubert (DDB) ; Production Company: Unit 9
Other Credits
Account Management: Vincent Léorat, Florent Depoisier, Paul Royer ; Digital Project Manager: Vincent Vannha
Date
June 2011
Background
MINI drivers, both actual and potential, are non-conformists. At a time when everyone seems to be on Facebook doing the same old things, the challenge was to come up with an idea that tickled MINI drivers’ values whilst being innovative in itself.
Idea
MINI MAPS was the first racing game to use Google Maps free data, including satellite view, to give players the opportunity to travel the roads pretty much everywhere in the world!
The intention was to get users experiencing the same sort of fun driving a MINI on their keyboard as they would actually behind the wheel.
As in real life, players could choose the body colour, roof sticker and bonnet stripes of their car.
They could create races against time, races against friends on Facebook, and race in the realtime weather conditions, be they sunny, cloudy, during the day or at night, when the headlamps on the MINI lit up.
The triumph of MINI MAPS was in bringing together a range of technologies that had not been intended to work together.
But the result was hailed by Google’s own engineers, especially the technology that made possible the recognition of obstacles through an algorithm that recognised what's a road and what's a building.
Results
- More than 10,000 players during the first 2 days online.
- An average connection time (and thus driving with MINI) for 35 minutes per player.
- A tweet every minute for 3 weeks.
- A 200% increase in brand friends in a month (though the gain of fans wasn't the first objective for the brand)
- Much spillover PR in auto blogs and sites as well as advertising and design commentaries.
Our Thoughts
As smart as it is fun, this online game with combined technologies is a bit of a holy grail that teams around the world were all trying to get to and produce for a variety of car brands. But DDB Paris did it first and with a tone and likability factor that’s MINI all the way.