Car brands have a very low presence in Giphy’s transparent stickers section, where people find content for their Instagram stories. Lexus is one of the most premium car brands in the world was looking for ways to become a noticeable part of social media conversation among the younger audience. The campaign had two main objectives: enhance Lexus brand experience in Instagram and Giphy and activate owners of other car brands with zero media budget.

Lexus decided to use the element of the social media many young people have strong feelings for: GIFs and add some fun into Instagram stories with GIF stickers that turn any car related story into Lexus branded ad.

We focused on male and female car owners who spend their days posting, commenting and filming a lot of car-related content. This audience is very responsive to any brand activity on Instagram and because of the low proposition in the sticker section are eager to use any GIF content which has acceptable production value.

We created a GIF sticker pack, where half of the stickers had visible Lexus branding and the other half of the stickers had tens of small logos inside. The first half was tagged with Lexus related key-words. The other half was tagged with key-words which were related to Lexus main competitors – BMW, Mercedes, Audi. So when other car brands owners searched for some gif-content for stories from their brands our slightly branded stickers were the first ones to appear in search results. The branding was so unobtrusive that even if noticed, those stickers were still used to create content for Instagram stories and were deliberately exposed to their followers.

38,6 million views in the first month, with 100% of them being earned organically. The objective exceeded by 860%. $0 media investment = $2.2 million in media earned.