POLO SAFETY SHOOT

TitlePOLO SAFETY SHOOT
BrandVOLKSWAGEN BELGIUM
Product/ServiceNEW VOLKSWAGEN POLO
Category G07. Photography / Curation of Images
Entrant DDB BRUSSELS, BELGIUM
Idea Creation DDB BRUSSELS, BELGIUM
Credits
Name Company Position
Peter Ampe DDB Brussels Creative Director
Frederic Zouag DDB Creative
Nicolas Gaspart DDB Creative
Jonathan D'Oultremont DDB Creative
Philippe Gerin DDB Strategic Planner
Sylvie De Couvreur DDB Account Director
Quentin Maryns DDB Client producer
Anneleen Vande Voorde DDB Account Executive
Brigitte Verduyckt DDB Art Buyer
Frederik Buyckx Frederik Buyckx Photography
Fish Eye Fish Eye Technical production
Benjamin Hiffe DDB DTP
Dagmar Duportail Breakfast Club Producer
Hans Michiels DDB Client Producer

The Campaign

One of its technological features is its pedestrian detection which not only recognises pedestrians in front of the car, but also initiates an emergency brake if the driver doesn’t respond in time. By combining this feature with a mounted camera on the car which detects if and when it’s activated, we let the New Polo take pictures of the people it saved. This resulted in a series of real-life pictures demonstrating the use of this life-saving feature.

Creative Execution

We fitted the Polo with an SLR camera using a wide-angle lense. A webcam connected the camera to the Polo’s dashboard. If the webcam detected the pedestrian detection icon lighting up, the camera automatically took a picture of whatever was happening in front of the car. Driving around with this setup resulted in a series of pictures demonstrating the real-life use of the Polo’s pedestrian detection. Thus, making an abstract piece of technology tangible and showing its life-saving potential. Three of these pictures were used in a national outdoor campaign to support the New Polo’s launch. To reinforce the pictures we opted for a simple but direct copy line: “Saved by the New Polo”. This highlighted the fact that these were real people and that they Polo’s safety isn’t only for those on the inside, it’s for those on the outside as well.

Indication of how successful the outcome was in the market

The campaign is still running at the time of writing so full results aren’t available yet although the general impact of the campaign is already noticeable on a business level. The Polo Safety Shoot was created in order to raise awareness for the new Polo and its safety features. Detailed awareness levels aren’t available yet, but there’s already a clear impact in the number of leads we have generated: 2.800 leads were registered in the finale two weeks of October (when the campaign was running). Compared to 1.600 leads in the same period last year this means an increase of 75%.

The Polo is a car aimed at quite a wide audience: it serves as both a safe first car for youngsters and as a second car in many families. It’s long been a car famed for the safety it delivers whilst remaining a pretty small. But the perception of safety has changed: it used to be all about being robust and sturdy, where nowadays people see safety more as something driven by intelligence and technology. So, to demonstrate the Polo’s safety in a refreshing and relevant way we focused on how it interacts with and responds to its surroundings, because the Polo is safe both for those on the inside ànd the outside. Pedestrian detection was the feature used to spearhead this approach, installing the Polo as the small but sturdy car you’ve always known, now delivering safety through modern technology as well.