2023 was a challenging year for car brands and car sales in Sweden. The harsh economic climate and the government's removal of the country’s new-buyer-bonus had created widespread disinterest in automotive advertising.

Škoda faced three challenges to launch of the New Enyaq in December: With significantly lower media budget than the competition, the solution had to generate earned reach instead of buying it. Secondly, as the competitors had doubled in recent years, Škoda needed an idea that would challenge conventional thinking about its brand. And finally, all of this had to happen at Christmas – the noisiest time of year from a media perspective.

The data that unlocked our insight was a 59% increase in complaints about cars to The Swedish National Board for Consumer Disputes (ARN 2024), creating an opportunity for Škoda to target what was previously the more unreachable audience of all – buyers who already

Armed with our insight that new cars were losing their shine faster. We needed an opportunity that would connect the launch to the audience in a Christmas way.

The creative idea came from the paradox that Sweden’s is a progressive innovator and adopter of change with an unwavering love of preserving Christmas traditions. So, at a time when category media buying skewed to being as modern as possible, Škoda could back in time to leverage biggest Christmas tradition of all – door-to-door carolling – as both message and media in one innovative activation.

The Christmas Conversion Choir, was a unique Škoda event that spread car joy through song. Targeting an affluent suburb where more cars were still being sold, we enlisted children from The Adolf Fredrik children's choir to sing Enyaq-themed Christmas carols to a bemused yet appreciative audience of non- Škoda owners in an attempt to convert them to

Because we couldn't compete with our competitors' media investments for Christmas. We made the strategic choice to instead use a unique channel and messenger to influence people to give Škoda Enyaq a chance.

The result was a classic trojan-horse strategy: Take a tradition people think they recognise and change it subtly while they watch.

Targeting was achieved using new car registration data, to benchmark sales to find one suburb that was over-indexing in competitor sales compared to Škoda.

Proof would be achieved in whether this new media thinking would be more effective than traditional buying. So, we set out to benchmark earned success against what buying a traditional print ad would have achieved in one of Sweden’s two biggest newspapers.

The solution was like a singing direct mail advert in Enskede, a suburb just outside Stockholm with its idyllic snowy Swedish villas and driveways parked full with Volvos and Teslas - the perfect stage for our Christmas Conversion Choir.

The execution was a melodic moment that made competitors' owners stop in their own doorways and enjoy all of Škoda Enyaq's USPs in a different and humerous way. Something traditional channel choices find hard to do, especially at Christmas.

Post-event we turned the moment into its own media, amplifying the captured footage to a wider audience via YouTube and in Social Media.

The campaign was in market during the last two weeks of December, 2023.

The goal of the campaign was to prove a media idea like is more effective than traditional reach advertising over a two-week period in December 2023.

For far less investment than a run of print ads in the biggest Swedish daily newspapers, the Christmas Conversion Choir achieved SEK 1.5 million in earned reach (an ROI of 127%).

On top of this, media buying to amplify the event on YouTube helped the choir achieve 1.3 million impressions and a unique reach of over 800,000. This was bolstered on TikTok, where the singing achieved almost 6 million impressions.