The Brief

The Volkswagen Goft GTI's heritage of performance dates back to the birth of the model, making it a classic icon for speed-freaks. The target audience of Golf GTI has always been known for male-driven, technology-savvy, and competitive-minded. With the launch of long-awaited and massively-anticipated GTI MK VI, we used SPEED to create hype among car lovers.

Creative Execution

The strategy was not about re-inventing the wheel to identify a new proposition, rather it was to find a new strategy to market performance: To let as many people experience “speed” as possible – even before putting them behind the wheels. The strategy needed to make “speed” fun, relevant, non-technical, interactive – in a nutshell, make speed viral and make the best use of the digital platform to maximize the market noise.

Describe the creative solution to the brief/objective.

We took seven of the world’s fastest talents and got viral with their hi-speed skills just weeks before the GTI’ s official shipping day. To name a few: the world’s fastest striper, the world’s cup stacking champion, the fastest rice cake maker and painter. We seeded their films thru TV channels, forums, fan sites and youtube. We even marketed SPEED via chained emails: Introducing Speed around the World, an email-based viral game for bandwidth testing, let your GTI’s speed raced against the world’s internet congestion and latency. All these brought traffic streaming into our website: www.gtilovespeed.com. Alongside the speed videos the site hosted other fun speed-themed content and interactive gaming.

Results

Never before has an online car launch engaged the audience with such a wealth of speed experiences. While competitors resort to tactical price and features, we made the brand’s speed heritage our central message. Most importantly, we created record-breaking sales – first shipment sold out and loads of free press coverage and blog buzz. 27,499 unique web visitors generated 795,835 hits in the 1st week.