The 24h Social Race is a worldwide-scaled campaign launched by Porsche in June 2014, to gather its markets around brand’s historical return to the legendary race, the 24h of Le Mans. Indeed, even after 16 years of absence, with 16 overall victories, Porsche’s success in Le Mans is unrivalled yet.

Knowing that Porsche’s racing heritage was not strong enough to connect with the Chinese market (China is the second largest single market for Porsche after the U.S.A - source: Forbes Asia), we developed the first ever 24-Hour Social Race, literally opposing Twitter to Weibo users during the 24h of Le Mans.

Digital strategically speaking, an online hijack of the strong competition spirit between East and West cumulated with the concept of a tweet race, was an ideal and powerful layer to pass on brand racing spirit and heritage to its young but key markets.

Concretely, a 24-hour WebGL platform has been developed to live-monitor and connect these two major micro-blogging giants; with live data-visualizations (networks and teams rankings), team stand, monitoring boards (to see live discussions both on Twitter and Weibo), and a wall of Porsche’s Racing heritage content allowing people, by tweeting it, to race even faster.

To support this digital-centric idea, video teasers, billboards, banners, influencers & PR strategies have been developed.

As the result, 20 000 teams were on the starting line, they posted 70k tweets both on Twitter and Weibo.

It generated two trending topics, 250 press articles, a total of 37.5M worldwide media impressions on the micro-blogging platforms, 750k unique visitors went on the website, and spent on it a cumulated time of a year.

With 80% of all tweets, China left USA in the dust, but the winner has been a Twitter team, which posted almost 3 000 tweets in 24 hours.