Every year, big wave rider Garret McNamara challenges Nazaré’s giant waves in Portugal. This is where he set the world record when he rode a 34-meter wave. Mercedes-Benz is the official provider of his vehicles in Nazaré.

Although Nazaré’s Zon North Canyon event has a very high profile Mercedes-Benz wasn't getting the awareness they wanted as a sponsor. That was the challenge: making this sponsorship visible and relevant throughout the event for a broad audience.

The idea we came up with was to create a Mercedes-Benz surfboard. A board thought specifically for Nazaré’s giant waves and Garret’s style of surfing. It had to be the fastest board ever built. With Garret and the engineering and design team at Mercedes-Benz AMG in Stuttgart we built and tested a very unique surfboard on par with the storied Silver Arrow line of vehicles.

We developed a custom-made telemetry system that would allow us to register Garret’s top speed. The media investment was minimal and only in digital. We didn't have a campaign, we had a film on YouTube that told the story.

All the media work was through PR connecting directly with local and international media. The outcome of those contacts was the presence of all broadcast TV stations from Portugal at Nazaré on the day he first used the Mercedes surfboard to interview him.

Just by contacting online and offline media we got Mercedes-Benz values across to the relevant media outlets positioning the brand as innovative, youthful and irreverent, going against the common belief that Mercedes-Benz is a brand for “older people”.

There was no right media outlet for this project, so our media outlet was the surfboard itself. There was no media team, but our production team had the engineers and designers from Mercedes-Benz AMG from Stuttgart building the best media outlet ever made for the sea. They took this challenge as a once in a lifetime opportunity to apply all their knowledge in uncharted waters from design up to production materials and the iconic Mercedes-Benz silver paint. The surfboard was officially announced and shown by Garrett in front of thousands of people right after riding it at Nazaré. At the same time Mercedes-Benz released photos and videos that told the full story. The surfboard hit the news and the story went viral. To make the story richer for traditional media we also divulged the custom-made telemetry system that allowed us to register Garrett’s top speed at Nazaré.

The results went far beyond our initial desires. The news of the making of a Mercedes-Benz surfboard travelled the world. Besides primetime news shows and features in newspapers the surfboard marked it’s presence on The Huffington Post, The Verge, PSFK, Hypebeast, The Inertia, Surfer, Surfline, Surf Europe, Trip, Design Boom, Design Father, Red Bull’s website and Pamela Anderson’s twitter account. Earned media surpassed one million euros of investment. And the amount of comments of individuals expressing their desire to own a surfboard manufactured by Mercedes-Benz is just impossible to count.