Title	VRS UP
Brand	ŠKODA UK
Product/Service	SOCIAL MEDIA CAMPAIGN
Category	A09. USE OR INTEGRATION OF DIGITAL OR SOCIAL MEDIA
Entrant Company	AIS London, UNITED KINGDOM
Contributing Company	AIS London, UNITED KINGDOM
Media Agency	MEDIACOM London, UNITED KINGDOM

Name	Company	Position
Geoff Gower	Ais London	Executive Creative Director
Kevin Bratley	Ais London	Creative Director
Ian Cochran	Ais London	Copywriter
Jay Packham	Ais London	Art Director
Sophie Bastow/Dormon	Ais London	Senior Community Manager
Joe Hoppard	Ais London	Senior Social Planner
Emma Huismans	Ais London	Group Account Director
Greg Machray	Ais London	Senior Project Manager

The Campaign

It's not easy to engage a wider audience with Jon from Scarborough talking on Facebook about the tyres on his Octavia car. Our challenge was to find new, interesting ways to help bring out this passion and satisfy the audience's increasing demand for real-time responses.

Results

It's not easy to engage a wider audience with Jon from Scarborough talking on Facebook about the tyres on his Octavia. But the ŠKODA community love the ŠKODA brand with a passion. A passion so infectious, we knew we could use it to capture attention. Our strategy was to use the brand advocacy of fans and followers to promote ŠKODA. To find new, interesting ways to help bring out this passion and satisfy the audience's increasing demand for real-time responses. Our vRS Up content campaign allowed the community to suggest and then see their everyday objects vRSed up into concept drawings and 3D animations in 6.8 seconds - the time the car takes to get from 0-60mph. The speed of return and personalised nature of the content was what made the campaign so sharable and is what prompted a huge response. By creating a dedicated team devoted to feeding co-authored content to the community, we were able to deliver personalised responses in a short enough timeframe to keep the attention of an easily distracted audience. Content the community felt they'd invested in and wanted to share. And content entertaining enough for people who've never considered a ŠKODA to notice.

Our objective was to maximise social engagement in a way that would amplify product truths to an audience that wouldn’t usually be exposed to our broadcast content, by bringing an understanding of Octavia vRS to a new social audience. We worked closely with the client’s media agency to ensure that a select number of statuses were promoted to the target audiences within Facebook. Typically we chose the ‘task’ statuses which invited customers to participate with ideas. This led to anticipation of our creative response and engagement around that creative asset led to viral reach.

The campaign reached over two million Facebook users and we smashed our target of 25,000 views, achieving over 120,000 video plays thanks to continued engagement and sharing. Facebook engagement was 10 times the benchmark for UK automotive brands. And Facebook have even uses the campaign as a case study when sharing examples of great content campaigns with other brands. And the sale of the vRS was almost as fast as the car itself. During the campaign, ŠKODA sold an average of 440 additional cars per month from August to October compared to three months previously. Making the business an additional £100m in vehicle sales. Now we can’t take credit for all of those sales but we sure helped spread the good word of ŠKODA to fans both old and new.