Situation:

Voice assistants are becoming increasingly popular. MBUX is one of the most innovative in-car voice assistants mainly because many functions of the car can be controlled through speech. But most of the people only know the voice-assistants of Google, Apple and Amazon.

Brief:

In the world of Voice-Assistants Mercedes-Benz doesn't have their common competitors like Audi or BMW, but now their competitors are Google, Apple and Amazon. How can we show the advantage of our MBUX Voice-Assistant?

Objectives:

Convince our clients, that our MBUX system has all the functionalities a Mercedes has to offer under one roof and therefore is the most modern in-car voice assistant on the market today.

We developed protocols with MBUX that combine the different functionalities a Mercedes car has to offer to solve everyday problems, like getting a baby to sleep or keeping a pizza warm after takeaway. 

We made these protocols together with Georges Massing, Vice-President Digital Vehicle and Mobility at Mercedes-Benz and implemented them in 60-second social media clips in which Georges Massing himself is the one who activates the protocols to help the protagonist.

By e.g. simply saying "Hey Mercedes, activate the Baby Protocol" different functionalities of the Mercedes-Benz are activated, like playing lullaby music, darken windows, set ambient light, starting active body control (which makes the car starts to lull). These functionalities together are letting the baby fall a sleep and are now combined in a protocol, activated with one simple sentence.

The protocols were presented with 60-second social media clips that explain the protocols in a funny way.

Our target audience are car enthusiasts. This audience is interested in new innovations within the car industry, but is also tech-minded. This mostly younger target audience could also be best reached by addressing their everyday problems.

We choose to make 60 second social-media clips and spread them on all global social-media channels of Mercedes-Benz like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn to reach a big audience of car enthusiasts. We reached more than 2 million views within a week, without any paid media spendings.

By using 60-second social media clips we were able to present our protocols in a funny way. This was very important to us, because we wanted to make the MBUX technology tangible and accessible. We wanted to show and explain the endless possibility of the MBUX system in an innovative yet simple way.

The first posting was published at September 11th 2019. After presenting the Baby protocol during the Mercedes-Benz Keynote at the IAA 2019 in Frankfurt, we published new protocols like the pizza protocol in november.

We didn’t used any paid media. Only organic postings on the global accounts of Mercedes-Benz on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn.

After reaching more than 2 million car enthusiasts on social media, the engagement was enormous with 10,73% of the viewers liked the videos.

This made Mercedes-Benz decide to take our social-media idea and actually develop the MBUX protocols in their future MBUX systems. Starting with the baby protocol. Ola Källenius, CEO of Mercedes-Benz, even presented the MBUX protocols as one of the headlines of the Mercedes-Benz Keynote at the IAA 2019 in Frankfurt, which also resulted in free press-coverage.