We created an interactive experience based around a 53-billion pixel photograph.

A photograph like this is unheard of in an automotive category that is more accustomed to close-up beauty shots of the product. It’s a formula we turned on its head.

Depicting a Bentley Mulsanne on the Golden Gate Bridge, the image was so large that, if printed out, it would cover a football pitch. It was hosted online, where users were invited to zoom in from the bridge vista right down to the car and the hand-stitched embroidery on the seat.

The entire interior of the car was available to explore – as was the story behind the single stitch at the image’s centre.

The campaign was summed up in a single, PR-able headline:‘Bentley uses NASA technology to capture the world’s most extraordinary car photograph’– a line repeated the world over, as journalists, bloggers and influencers shared the idea.

The photo itself took a whole week to capture. It was taken in batches using a computer-controlled camera mount system by Gigapan – the commercial version of the technology developed by NASA to enable their Mars Rovers to take panoramic photos of the surface of the Red Planet.

Each batch comprised 2,000 individual exposures and took two and a half hours to capture – long enough for the bridge to move in the heat and the wind. Despite the vast array of lenses at the team’s disposal, heat haze also proved a problem, given the distance between the camera and the subject.

Solving problems in real time, our production team even had to edit the base code of the software controlling the camera mount, effectively modifying the technology on location.

Processing the resulting image took a whole day. Saving it took hours; handling the data alone required the creation of a bespoke system. But over the next three months, it was assembled, piece by piece, before it was made available on a dedicated website.

The online experience quickly went viral, racking up more than 2.2 million page views to beat its impressions target by 141% and its page view target by 191%

Average dwell time was also impressive, at 1 minute 6 seconds.

The campaign earned 1.26 million likes on Instagram (and over 4,500 comments), 146,000 reactions (Likes etc) and 12,000 shares on Facebook, and 450,000 YouTube views.

Duplicated reach was close to 300 million.