Title	THE VOLKSWAGEN GIF DEALER
Brand	VOLKSWAGEN
Product/Service	CARS
Category	C03. Social Community Building & Management
Entrant	DDB BRUSSELS, BELGIUM
Idea Creation	DDB BRUSSELS, BELGIUM

Name	Company	Position
Jolien Elegeert	DDB BRUSSELS	Art director

Why is this work relevant for PR?

Our efforts changed the tonality of the conversations on our Facebook page from negative to positive. Not through paid media, but through surprising dialogue which prompted interaction with our audience.

Background

o Situation The Belgian Facebook page of Volkswagen has more than 190.000 followers. Each day we interact with more than 1000 of them. They send us personal messages, like, comment or share the content we create and don’t hesitate to express their unfiltered love & hate about the brand with us. o Brief Help us interact with all these comments, both the loving ones and the hating ones, in the Volkswagen way: make it fun and make it human. We want to act as a person instead of a distant brand. o Objectives Succes would be measured in two ways: - Increase the engagement on our Facebook page. If we become more active, we want our audience to be more active as well. - Improve the tonality of the conversations on our Facebook page from rather negative to positive. Help the lovers outshine the haters.

Describe the creative idea

Due to a lot of negative press lately for Volkswagen, we felt the urge to invest in our community management in a fun way without getting the attention on the negativity again. That’s why we created a database of +100 branded GIFs to illustrate every possible emotion a community manager could encounter during a conversation with our followers. To keep the branding-aspect light and focus on the human aspect of community management, we chose to put a ‘Volkswagen dealer’ at the forefront.

Describe the strategy

o Target audience: - Those already interacting with us: through sharing their love/hate they act as a spokesperson towards their own Facebook friends who see it appear in their feed. - The lurkers: those who follow us, watch a post appear, but don’t interact with us. o Target media GIFs are the language of the internet. 300 million people share 2 billion GIFs every day. Demonstrating how widespread GIFs have become as a tool of quickly expressing feelings. So perfect to use on Facebook where the most interaction with our followers takes place. o PR planning To kick off our new GIF tool, we chose the annual Brussels Motor Show of 2018 (January)- the biggest momentum for the automotive industry and the time social media activity is booming and fan conversations on our page increases remarkably. o Approach All GIFs were shared as replies to comments on our Facebook page.

Describe the execution

o Implementation of the PR On social media you have a lot of haters. As a much-discussed brand, Volkswagen receives also negative comments on Facebook. But it’s not always easy to reply on these comments. Either we ignore them, which results in bad community management, or we comment, which involves some braveness. That’s why Volkswagen came up with a witty response to reply on both positive and negative comments. Resulting in a behaviour change among the followers and a better engagement. o Timeline To kick off our GIF tool, we chose the annual Brussels Motor Show of 2018 (January)- the biggest momentum for the automotive industry and the time social media activity is booming and fan conversations on our page increases remarkably. o Scale: The Belgian Facebook page of Volkswagen has +190.000 followers. Each day we interact with more than 1000 of them. But we also reach the lurkers.

List the results

Tier 1: Tone and message delivery: fun, witty and human. The mood and tonality of our conversations switched from rather negative to positive in less than a month. However we don't have results from it yet (because it's still ongoing), it's pretty obvious that the more positive you are towards a brand, the more likely you are to visit the dealership. Coverage depth : quality – The GIFs are used only when it’s the best thing to answer. Sometimes people just need concrete information. So we use around 15 GIFS out of 100 comments. Tier2: - The average engagement rate on the page increased with 0,5%. From 2,2% in 2017 to 2,7% in the first 6 months of 2018. - Interactions on our conversations increased with 150% compared to conversations that didn’t have GIFs in the months before. Tier 3 isn't relevant in this case.