We needed a strong, quirky creative idea, tailor-made for a Millennial social media audience who love memes, viral videos and cute animals.

So we turned to social listening, looking at the stand-out features of the Corsa in turn, and conversations among new and learner drivers.

We discovered that a significant number of first-time drivers were talking about parallel parking: how hard it is, how stressful they found it, and how worried they were about having to parallel park in driving tests.

Since Advanced Park Assist means the Corsa can park itself, this was clearly the angle that would resonate most with our young audience.

Our idea was to produce a piece of original video demonstrating that the Corsa is incredibly easy to park, however inexperienced a driver you are.

Even if, in fact, you are a dog. And so #ParallelBarking was born.

We put our canine talent, a boxer called Gerty, in the driving seat of a Corsa on a London high street. Using hidden cameras, we filmed her parallel parking the car (or rather, the car parking itself) and the amazed reactions of onlookers.

We turned the footage into a 58-second film, #ParallelBarking, and captured shorter pieces of footage, stills and GIFs.

A teaser film of a paw pulling some car keys off a table was posted on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram a few days before we went live. We launched the hero film across social channels on 21 March, supported with paid media and digital advertising.

We shared further content by allowing “Gerty” to take over Vauxhall’s social channels. She became a social star, allowing us to extend the campaign by highlighting other features of the Corsa (eg Apple CarPlay by sharing playlists, and the “bark activated” On-Star system).

This was essentially a branded technology demo, but it exploded on social channels, creating thousands of Gerty fans. A new social media star was born.

Reach:

• 3 million video views

• One hour after release, the #ParallelBarking video had been watched 100,000+ times

• Media pickup included the Daily Mail, Mirror, Express, and TopGear.com.

Engagement:

• Posts were shared 5,000+ times

• Engagement rate of 5.3% (versus target 2.7%)

• According to social analysis firm Unmetric, we reached a wider audience with the most shares per social post than competitors such as Nissan, Volkswagen and Citroen, and our engagement score (measuring community response to posts) was higher.

• Positive social media sentiment towards Vauxhall increased and negative comments were reduced from 50% to 8%.

Conversion:

• Click through rate: 4.8% vs. target 2.3%

• Traffic arriving from social spent on average five minutes on the site – two minutes more than from search, direct and email.