BMW M135i | The Fastest Christmas Song
BMW (Schweiz) AG
Issue 27 | June 2013
Agency
Draftfcb Zurich
Creative Team
Executive Creative Director Dennis Lueck Art Director Christoff Strukamp Copywriter Maximilian Kortmann
Production Team
Pumpkin Film Fraqment Film Kirschner Music Drei elemente
Date
December 2012
Background
In 2011, DraftFCB Zürich created “The Fastest Christmas Card In The World”, which captured over ½ million YouTube views.
In 2012, the challenge was to come up with a mailing to 3,000 BMW drivers in Switzerland, which would top that success.
Idea
After the fastest Christmas card came the fastest Christmas carol.
The idea was to get an acapella group to sing “Jingle Bells” inside the sporty new BMW M135i, which was kitted out as a full recording studio. The twist was they had to sing the song while the car was being driven by racing driver Martin Tomczyk at speeds approaching 250km/h.
This was then sent in a card with a special sound chip to all BMW Switzerland’s customers. A QR code and a link to the microsite allowed them to watch the making-of video at fastestchristmassong.ch
Results
The Fastest Christmas Song in the World achieved over 1.2 million views on YouTube, as well as hundreds of thousands posts in social media. It attracted PR coverage around the world, reaching an estimated 120 million people.
In addition, 65,000 eCards with the song were sent across 199 countries. In short: the fastest Christmas song in the world was a mailing that went viral, from 3,000 people out to many millions of potential new customers.
Our Thoughts
Mail is great. But mail and digital together is almost always greater and this is a brilliant example of the symbiosis that can exist between the two.
From the very start, it was a mailing designed to go viral. The creative team would have been thinking, how can we create a card that gets recipients to go online to deepen the experience and then want to share it?
What I like about the idea particularly is that it started with existing BMW customers. It was through their networks that BMW was able to reach out around the world with a classic demonstration of the mad, bad fun that there is to be had in a ridiculously over-powered little car like the M135i.
Mail is almost always thought of as a transactional tool, but here’s proof it can be a brilliantly cost-efficient way to help grow the brand.