Formerly a sub-brand of SEAT, CUPRA became a standalone performance marque in 2018, after over 2 decades of exhilarating racing success. Focused on electrification and sports performance, their future-facing brand ethos targets the next generation of drivers who themselves seek the unconventional.

The automotive market is difficult for new brands to make an impact in. Like any new entrant, CUPRA had low brand awareness, compounded by a lack of scale and real-world visibility with limited retail footprint & few cars on roads. Furthermore, CUPRA’s marketing budget could not compete directly with the more established competition where heavyweight, high-budget ATL campaigns are commonplace amongst market-leaders seeking brand growth, new customer acquisition and vital test-drive bookings.

Our brief was to introduce this ambitious new challenger brand to the next generation of drivers, allowing them to experience the emotional intensity of CUPRA’s Passion For Performance in a manner which matched the brand’s ethos.

We created the world’s biggest, most innovative and most challenging next gen test-drive – deliberately tapping into the audience’s need for speed, and the competitive spirit within the driving simulator community.

In a unique partnership with XBOX and triple A driving sim Forza Horizon 5, ‘CUPRA Impossible Challenge’ was created specifically to place 3 CUPRA models at the heart of the most authentic driving experience out there - an environment where the brand could not only test its mettle against every established car brand from Ford to Ferrari, but could use the features of the game itself tap into Next Gen Driver’s communities and engage them to amplify the message further.

From super-sporty racing concept car, the CUPRA UrbanRebel, the combustion fuelled Formentor VZ5, to the sleek and sexy CUPRA Tavascan, players were introduced to the whole spectrum of CUPRA cars, to test their skills to the max.

Our audience was the Next Gen Driver: for whom virtual and real worlds are fast becoming indistinguishable, who inhabit hyper-connected and hyper-reactive closed communities beyond the open social graph, and who spend overwhelming amounts of media time in gaming environments, with 87% defining themselves as Gamers.

Gaming was an obvious channel for reach; creating impact required digging much deeper. Gaming offers them a variety of benefits, but for car-obsessives in particular, research showed acquiring mastery through persistence and perfection was critical to how they play, alongside their innate desire to compete for perceived rank within community.

80% of those who go onto purchase a car first test drive it IRL (that’s gamer for In Real Life); we decided to test that insight in the virtual world. Our strategy was to invite Next Gen Drivers to get virtually behind the wheel and feel the thrill of CUPRA’s track heritage firsthand.

The meticulous reproduction of the cars in the Forza Horizon 5 game was of the utmost importance. CUPRA’s heritage in beautiful, thoughtful and technical design was at the forefont of their expectation in the re-creation, whereas naturally there were limitations within the gaming space which couldn’t always be overcome – be that an always-on feature light or matte finish paint.

This was particularly pertinent with the UrbanRebel, which as a concept car didn’t even have a real car to compare against. The photo-realistic representation of how cars were portrayed in the game because both its biggest strength, and biggest challenge in achieving the perfect re-creation of that 3 cars in order to launch them to the masses, but one that was overcome through scrutiny of from the brand’s product team, and the boundary-pushing graphic development of the game designers.

Next Gen Drivers <3 CUPRA!

20 million players downloaded the CUPRA UrbanRebel, Formentor VZ5 and Tavascan during the campaign period, with significantly more cars added to players’ garages since they launched in game as evergreen playable cars; with the UrbanRebel alone experienced by 1/3 of the global FH5 player base in the first 2 months. The cars were raced 6 million times: 110 YEARS continuous racing in our virtual CUPRAs - equivalent dwelltime to 2.1bn average website visits.

Amongst those exposed, we saw a +3%pt in spontaneous awareness, +6%pt consideration and purchase intent, with 78% of gamers currently in market for a new car considering a CUPRA. Specifically Next Gen Drivers +13%pts consideration, contributing to a 58ppt increase in unaided brand awareness.

Assessing this virtual test drive campaign against traditional CPA metrics means it delivered 530x more test drives than the brand’s traditional marketing plan; an equivalent ROMI of 680:1