The Volvo V90 was first launched in November 2016, mainly targeted towards men, between 45-54 years-old, part of social classes 1-2. But almost a year after the launch, it was still struggling in terms of awareness and people coming into the showroom to testdrive this new model.

So our campaign brief had 2 objectives: create awareness and visibility around the Volvo V90 towards the target audience; and get them in the car for a testdrive and therefore, increase the offline sales.

We agreed to focus on one main objective: the generation of 660 testdrives over a period of 4 weeks. So, 38 times more testdrive requests than normal for the Volvo V90. Strongly believing to achieve the KPI, we needed as starting point an uplift in awareness as well.

Every car commercial shows the car in ideal circumstances: on cinematographic roads, in breathtaking sceneries. If you go for a test drive, the reality is far from what you saw in the spot.

Unless we could organise test drives on the same beautiful Swedish roads as in our Volvo V90 commercial?

We could. We did.

We invited people to literally test drive the commercial. We gave them the opportunity to try out the new Volvo V90 along the exact same Swedish route as in the commercial. Not only driving the same car, but also experiencing the same panoramas, the same highlights, etc.

We managed to create a test drive experience completely in line with the international commercial provided by Volvo Car International (which was mandatory to us).

Getting stuck in traffic is a daily habit when hitting the road in Belgium. In the past 5 years, congestion severity increased with 40% (2016) . Resulting in not only longer, but also more persistent traffic jams. And causing a never-ending source of irritation and frustrations. Particularly, if you want to testdrive a beautiful new car such as the Volvo V90. Which is a huge contradictory with how automotive brands are communicating around their various models. Always in some restful and empty roads where you really can experience the beauty and performance of a desired car. At least, until now.

We wanted to give potential buyers the chance to testdrive the car in the best possible way: at ease and with the chance to test its performance. Leading to a simple, but strong call-to-action: experience the new Volvo V90 like in our spot.

The centre of the campaign was a dedicated website where people could explore the beautiful route of the commercial and participate in the online contest. To validate their participation, they had to book a test drive with the Volvo V90 in Belgium first.

We drove traffic to the website with an integrated media strategy, combining offline media (TV, radio, print) and a wide variety of digital media (pre-roll and impactful video banners, native & standard (CPC), email, social media, programmatic and search). This mix generated qualified website traffic and boosted the test drive requests. Most of the campaign material was made by re-editing the international Volvo film, altering the supers and voice-over.

The amazing experiences of the winners were spread on Linkedin, Facebook and the dedicated website.

People could follow their adventures on the exact same roads as in the commercial, using the same camera moves, visiting the same highlights.

The campaign massively created both interest and engagement with the Volvo-website(s).

• In terms of online media, the ads were shown more than 31M times (+ 17% impressions) and had been clicked 100K times (+ 79% clicks).

• We also largely overachieved our main objective. We generated 2.551 testdrive leads over a period of 4 weeks, or 386% of our KPI and 150x more testdrives than in a similar mid-June to mid-July period. From which 770 were directly linked to our digital campaign, the rest of the testdrives were booked via volvocars.be. This increase shows a clear rise in awareness as well around the car.

In terms of sales, there was an important uplift of 33% compared to May and 13% compared to January (Brussels Motorshow) which was supposed to be the most important month for Volvo.