Results

Business Challenge: The Golf is a key pillar of the Volkswagen business in Australia, it’s our most popular car and it makes up the majority of our sales. It’s critical we support it to maintain our share of an important category. However, every dollar we spend supporting Golf is a dollar we can’t spend claiming a share of a growing category like SUVs. We needed a way to support Golf that was just as effective as TV, but more efficient. Strategy: Turn a four-week TV burst into a six-month content campaign on Facebook. Tell a story about the Golf that can sustain interest, but also change the attitude of our audience. The Golf is an innovative car and when people understand why, they’re more likely to consider buying one. Idea: Impressive almost anywhere. The Golf is a great city car, but how will it stand up to the scrutiny of the 15 inhabitants of Blinman, South Australia. We’ll send a dealer to see if he can persuade these people that the Golf really is packed with impressive innovation.

We partnered with Facebook and considered the Facebook newsfeed as the main opportunity to enjoy the content from the very start of the project. The facebook newsfeed will always prioritize content it thinks a person will enjoy, which was a great creative standard to set ourselves throughout development – but Newsfeed also demands punchy, entertaining content that a user will stop scrolling and engage with to enjoy. We knew if we could get that right, our audience could engage with our story on their smartphones – which means they could engage with our content just about anywhere.

The campaign has been in market for six weeks, which is only a fraction of the campaign duration but early results are very positive. We’ve managed to reach the same size audience we would with TV, but done it with close to 1/5 of the spend. Of the people we reached, we’ve achieved six times the normal shift in message association we would expect from TV, changing the attitudes of potential customers. We’ve also seen in an ongoing Nielsen tracking study a ten-point lift in recall, and two-point lift in ‘associated with advanced technologies’, which outperforms any TV campaign we’ve run in the past five years.

Throughout our campaign we’ve used a mix of long and short form film content to tell a story that takes place over a week in small town in Blinman, South Australia. The story itself will be told almost exclusively through the facebook video platform, which means we’re not restricted by standard advertising formats and we can simply focus on the best way to tell each chapter of our story. The story itself is designed to sustain the interest of our audience over a six-month period, with each chapter of our story unfolding in four-week blocks of content online. Each block of content gives us the chance to show different sides of the story and highlight funny moments or moments of drama, which creates a non-linear narrative where the audience might see their favorite funny moment from the first chapter three times because the Facebook feed algorithm will always prioritize content it thinks the audience will love.