The local office of automotive brand Citroen approached us with connecting their brand with their new ambassador Peter Sagan, the most famous Slovak cyclist, the green jersey winner at Tour de France.

The solution was a viral video using Peter’s entertainment nature. In the video Peter Sagan parks his bicycle on the roof of his Citroen car.

The PR strategy was based on 3 pillars – 1. multi-video upload on various platforms, 2. targeted sharing via influential personalities and 3. media and spontaneous PR, which increased Citroen visibility and number of video views.

Thank to this strategy, the video actually went viral immediately, spreading organically via hundreds of web articles and got into ATL media the very first day. At zero media expense, the video generated millions of video views and a vast free PR coverage for Citroen.

We made a video of Peter Sagan parking his bike on the roof of his Citroen C5. We multi-uploaded the video on more than 30 different own uploads. We used owned and earned channels to spread the video across the web and social.

We then approached cycling community, portals with funny content, lifestyle and tabloid media, as well as ATL media. They published the whole video during the main news absolutely for free. The trick of the video is that the stunt is almost unbelievable. This forced people to comment and share it in social media. Social pages of international media posted the video and made an article about it with the video embed. This free online PR increased the views radically. Besides that, we used world-known influencers to post the video on their own social channels. All that made respected international media to publish our video. All for free.

The goal was to reach essential part of Slovak population by communicating the connection between Citroen and Peter Sagan.

The primary target of the viral video was to reach at least 30 000 views, which was the highest number of views of Citroen Slovakia´s online videos.

The video is currently uploaded on 50 different uploads, counting the total number of over 2.3 million views. Thanks to the strategy, the video has counted thousands of likes and shares on Facebook, hundreds of tweets and retweets and almost 200 online articles. The video got into all major Slovak national TV news and appeared as an article in national print media too.

Later the video got into international media - being broadcast on Eurosport TV station and France 3 TV station, the video gained much more viewers than originally expected. For a zero media budget the video generated media value exceeding 500,000 euro.