The Lexus brand has been long admired for its luxury credentials, quality and service. However, it is not known for being imaginative, exciting or cool. So the challenge was to connect with a new, younger audience and get them excited about the brand. However, the progressive luxury audience that it wanted to engage was not listening to Lexus, which was outnumbered and outspent by the German luxury automotive brands. To connect with its audience Lexus needed to do something to out-smart its competitors.
The answer was inspired by the words of Lexus Chief Engineer Haruhiko Tanahashi – “There is no such thing as impossible, it’s just a matter of figuring out how”. We created a real, rideable Hoverboard and shared the progress we made through a variety of social and media channels over a two month period.
From the very beginning, the project was designed to be digitally contagious – so it would spread like wildfire across social media and influence the influencers, meaning global coverage would become the fuel for the campaign.
Meticulous attention to detail was spent planning the two-month narrative for the project. A number of different videos and PR milestones were developed to engage the world’s media and key influencers at the right time.
In under 24 hours, the campaign drove more than 100million+ impressions, generated over 11million+ views and #LexusHover was trending on Twitter and Facebook. Mainstream media from BBC, CNN, USA Today, ABC World News published editorial on the campaign, and CNBC live-broadcast an interview with a marketing expert on their channel, heralding the tease film a “marketing slam-dunk by Lexus”.
On 5th August when the full campaign broke, international coverage exploded online – Reuters, Huffington Post, BBC, Wired, Bloomberg, Forbes, Wall Street Journal, E!Online, TMZ, Fox News and many more, were all writing and tweeting about the campaign. Fast Company even released a filmed interview piece with two of their tech editors questioning if you are a Lexus competitor what do you do next?
In total, the Lexus Hoverboard campaign has generated over US$56milllion in equivalent media value, driven more than 33+million views worldwide and over 1.7billion impressions. 97.5% of the local markets worldwide have activated the campaign online via PR and owned social media channels. 40% of web traffic driven to the Lexus site was Hoverboard related activity. The Lexus Hoverboard is currently the brand’s most successful online campaign to-date.
As the volume of global ‘branded content’ continues to grow exponentially, increasingly it takes something special to stand out. Lexus needed to tell the story of the imagination, ingenuity and creativity that runs through their brand. They needed to tell that story in a way that would be digitally contagious, where the world¹s press, digital influencers, and the public at large became the communicators, rather than paid for media plan.
To answer this challenge, together with Lexus we conceived, developed and created one of the iconic products of recent popular culture, the Hoverboard. For real. Showcasing their design and engineering credentials, but crucially also showing their pure imagination, the project took the world by storm. The unique project inspired a range of international audiences from tech, design, film, motoring, lifestyle and beyond, generating tens of millions of pounds of coverage purely by the strength of the idea, not the size of the media budget.