“Their lack of self-esteem is their dark secret”

Lonely Planet on Ireland

Our global T-Roc platform was based on a “Born Confident” tag line and was creatively brought to life through a black ram who stood out amongst the masses. However, if we were to move beyond standard push media we needed to execute an engaging, local idea within the global concept. We, having reservations on how this platform would resonate with Irish consumers, conducted desk research to support our thoughts. This culminated with our insight: Irish people are not comfortable celebrating their own confidence.

From this our idea was born; we took the global platform and inverted the concept. Our idea was to create a Twitter Bot that would scan Irish Twitter conversations and find those who were having a bad day, a rant or were just plain pessimistic and respond to them with a pre-written confidence boosting tweet.

Delivering Scale:

Launching in November we had an immediate 1+ building TV road-block; coinciding with a Twitter Trend and a time-blocked Snapchat takeover. Our impact building display and Outdoor followed. Tasking the creative agency to add #BornConfident to all Irish assets ensured clear integration between our scale and dialogue pillars.

Positive Dialogue:

Working with the search and social departments we developed a 1,000 strong keyword list that segmented into 10 conversation strands. With each strand we had est. 70+ replies ready and matched to respond to the public. To further ensure scale we also had three concurrent pillars:

1. Leveraging Events: sought out specific events and catered content depending on the event

2. Leveraging Influences: using VW brand ambassador for credibility and orchestrating when, what and where they would reply.

3. Leveraging Brands: Partnering with a popular Radio station to orchestrate on-air engagement and engaging in conversation with Irish brands.

Sales: Astonishingly, we soared past our sales target by 40% with our local client declaring "the factory can't make cars quick enough to keep up with Irish demand" (Mark McGrath Head of Marketing)

Campaign: By measure of success we delivered 82,746 unique visitors to the T-Roc page. During the same time period, there were 83,349 unique visitors to the Golf page, which is the second best-selling car in Ireland. Proudly, we also saw network success with the Global Engagement Director declaring "the UK team have been banging down my door on how you are activating this".

Sentiment: Our idea offered a rare opportunity for VW to communicate on a personal and individual level with its audience, at scale. This personal touch is evidenced in some of the responses we received. From social listening monitoring over the campaign period we also know that the over-riding emotion was JOY (at 60%).