In France, ŠKODA isn’t as popular as other brands.

In fact, it only has a 1.83% market share – way behind Renault, Peugeot, and Citroën, who control more than half of all car sales.

Due to this lack of consideration, the new ŠKODA FABIA was not on people’s radars. They weren’t searching for it or watching videos about it online.

Our challenge, therefore, was to put ŠKODA FABIA on the map – and get people considering it for the first time.

Our target audience was people over 25+, looking for a new urban car.

Our key insight: within the automotive path to purchase, 80% of buyers watch influencer test drive videos, product demos or opinion vlogs to gain information on new models.

Why? Because they trust their opinions more than the brands themselves.

Key to our strategy, we identified the most popular influencer reviews of competing models: the Renault Clio, the Peugeot 208, and the Citroën C3.

Three YouTubers stood out: Vlog Cars Passion (with 93.1K followers); Le Billey Auto (54.5K followers); Mécanique Sportive (51.8K followers).

To work, we would create special ads that could be digitally inserted onto billboards and other OOH spaces shown in their clips.

To go live, the influencers needed to be in on the trick, of course – so they could reupload the car review videos to their channels.

We would support the campaign with PR and social media.

Our target audience was people over 25+, looking for a new urban car.

Introducing ‘Review Hacking’ a stealth online campaign, which inserted the ŠKODA FABIA into other car brands’ videos.

First, we ‘modified’ key auto influencers’ review videos by digitally inserting billboards for the new ŠKODA FABIA. We created 70+ billboards total.

Messages joked about ŠKODA ‘being behind' (in popularity, and LITERALLY, at the back of the shot!), and highlighting the features that should put it in front.

“Did I tell you about my REAR-VIEW Camera?” said one; “Guess who’s equipped with LED headlights?” read another.

We shared ‘hacked’ versions back with the influencers and challenged them to repost to their YouTube channels… for fun, and most importantly, for free!

They agreed and, after publishing, shared on our owned Twitter and Meta channels and engaged with comments to drive the conversation.

Later, we extended reach and awareness by sharing best-of videos of the most audacious review ‘hacks’ and promoting on Twitter and Meta.

In total, 110 minutes of content were hacked with more than 70 unique billboards.

Our ‘hacked’ videos were watched 1.9M times.

Supporting social posts generated 4M impressions.

We had more than 9M impressions related to the activation, with Influence and Social Media activations.

Social content received 230K interactions – with an engagement rate of 6%.

We had 927K interactions on all Social Media publications, and 86% of comments were positive.

After sneaking onto our target’s radar, awareness of the new FABIA hit 63% - up from 58% pre-campaign.

And the best bit?

More people went and bought a FABIA.

Test drives increased by +19% in the month following the campaign.

And sales went up +10% vs. pre-campaign and even more YOY (we sold 1,067 cars in June 2022 vs. 444 in 2021).

The ultimate hack!