Instead of struggling with spy shots and gossip of the latest car prototype by BMW during testing, we turned the problem of information leakage into a marketing campaign.We placed our campaign message “dontblogaboutthis.com” on the actual prototype. Thus, every spy shot lead viewers to our site: an unbranded blog with the first mysterious images and videos about the new car.As we were not able to reveal details of the car before official start of communication we introduced a guessing game in which the photos and videos only gave hints and let the blogosphere and media do the rest.

The motto and URL “Don’t blog about this” (www.dontblogboutthis.com) added to the intrigue as it used reverse psychology and the company’s opposite intention was obvious: Start a global conversation over the upcoming vehicle from BMW.

The blogosphere is very self-referential. Once the story appeared on “autoblog.com” it began to spread quickly among the web internationally and achieved significant mainstream media coverage.

Consequently, in less than three months we gained: over 500,000 video views on Youtube, 420,000 new fans on the BMW Facebook site, 200,000 picture views on flickr, and donttblogaboutthis.com appeared in over 180 websites around the world (that we know of) such as The New York Times, USA Today, Top Gear, Wired Vision (Japanese edition of Wired) and Spiegel.All of this was achieved with no media spend.