The Tweet Race: real cars, real people, real roads - powered entirely by tweets. The core of the idea is based off the insight that people don’t live in separate digital and physical silos. Digital is a way to enhance, not replace, our physical experiences and relationships. Tweet Race was an interactive game-like digital experience that manifested itself in the streets of the real-world. A simple tweet could move a car. That direct online-offline correlation was a powerful engagement.

In playing the game, supporters were able to partake in the journey of a lifetime, watch these vehicles progress in real-time and tweet their teams to victory in the name of a good cause. The result was a highly engaging branded experience of an offline adventure fueled by online communities.

- Rather than organize the experience around vehicles, we organized it around a series of “driving principles” that guide how all Mercedes-Benz vehicles are designed, engineered and manufactured. That way, consumers could engage with and learn about the brand as a whole before focusing on a particular vehicle.

- Tech-savvy consumers want to actively explore, rather than sit through a passive experience. To engage them and keep them engaged, we used all the tools at our disposal

The goals of this campaign were to establish a presence in social media, connect with a younger audience and ultimately shift brand perception away from old luxury. Mercedes-Benz USA Facebook page gained 72,000 additional fans, majority in the 25-34 age range. On Twitter, the @MBtweetraceHQ handle gained 77,000 followers from zero. In terms of Twitter activity, there were 21,953 contributors (based on tweets that included a Tweet Race-related hashtag) which amplified into 545,425,558 Twitter impressions. The engineer’s prototype-testing videos received over 2 million views, ranking no.1 on Motor Trend’s Top Auto Ads Chart and #2 on AdAge’s Viral Video Chart for January 2011.