The Campaign

The campaign appeared in South East Asia and China through a combination of broadcast cable TV, a campaign website, partner websites and owned social media channels as well as being seeded through You Tube and YouKu (for China). The broadcast went out across China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Indonesia, Philippines, South Korea, Myanmar, Macau, Cambodia, Thailand, Papua New Guinea, Malaysia and Brunei. The digital seeding was focused on Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia for YouTube and China, Hong Kong and Taiwan for YouKu. As we were looking to reach many different countries with the broadcast, we had to take an approach to the branded entertainment that met the most strict product placement & selling rules. This meant that our content could feature our brand and product within the context of a broader storytelling, but with no overt selling of the features & benefits of the trucks and certainly no prices or offers, other than a call-to-action to visit the campaign website. Within digital and on the website, we were more overt around the features and benefits of the product. But given the different countries, prices and offers were not included as these are market dependent at the showrooms.

Results

How do you follow Jean-Claude van-damme?! Volvo Trucks had created a global, viral sensation that brought people’s attention to the idea that trucks didn’t have to be boring. But our objectives were to launch the new FH trucks into Asia. We had to build credibility and relevance in the region that this was a hard-working, truck that was contributing to progress in the region. Another product demonstration, no matter how epic, just wouldn’t cut it with an Asian audience who were looking for tangible evidence of achievement closer to home. Our idea: Volvo 360, Perspectives of Progress. A truck journey across Asia, from Singapore to China via Malaysia, Thailand and Laos identifying the drivers of progress that aligned with the brand values of Volvo Trucks (Driving Progress), picking out analogies to the product features of productivity, efficiency & uptime. Our stories demonstrated the role Volvo trucks play in people’s lives and society and how they drive progress. We wanted people to see the trucks from a new perspective as well view the progress in the region in a different way too. Three films of progress from Singapore, Thailand and China were created with National Geographic for broadcast and digital seeding. These were enhanced with epic 360 photographs taken from the truck’s journey that showed new perspectives of progress. All the content was housed on a campaign website that allowed people to explore our journey and have the features and benefits of the trucks brought to life using the same 360 degree photography. We encouraged people to watch and share the content from social media and the website with a competition to journey back to Singapore for an all-expenses trip. The media distribution described above and a PR plan balanced reach and awareness with targeted seeding to a more specific audience.

With our FOX partner, we utilized their broadcast network and digital presence on National Geographic and Fox Sports for SEA and Xing Kong for China. Awareness came from interstitial idents and news features. To reach a targeted audience, the videos were seeded through YouTube and YouKu. We focused on audiences who had shown interest in content related to trucks, automotive and industry in the region. All the content – on air or online, encouraged people to the campaign website where they could explore the whole journey of the trucks across Asia and view the new truck’s features & benefits.

The whole campaign – production, media and fees was less than SG$1M – less than one quarter of what was spent on the global JCVD campaign. The objectives were to achieve good reach, but also targeted engagement and sales. Key results: The broadcast activity delivered over SG$1.5 of media value, reaching more than 70M people Total social actions (views + likes + comments + shares) were 1.2M, including 878K video views – which was 37% higher than the target from the media investment, indicating organic sharing of the content or ‘earned media’. (benchmarks from Unruly suggest 10-20% uplift is above average for automotive as a whole, let alone for B2B) We achieved SG$580K worth of PR value across targeted trade publications and the marketing press including a feature in Campaign Asia. Over 150K people visited the campaign microsite. From a pure ‘media ROI’ perspective of coverage and PR value, we achieved 2.8:1 ROI We cannot disclose absolute sales figures, but order values are 30% up on the target set (which was benchmarked from the launch in Europe). With the cost investment in a new FH truck, we can confidently state that the campaign ROI is more than 10:1 on profitability.