In recent years, as the Brazilian economic recession has taken its toll, Audi Brazil focused its messaging on prices and offers. The result was that in the eyes of Brazilian consumers, the brand became less identified with being high-tech. Our objective with this campaign was to bring back all of Audi’s pioneering innovation and leave that front and center in our target’s perception of the brand.

Our idea was to associate our cars with the future. To do that, we promised our public something that would have been unimaginable: time travel. On the announced day and place, we did indeed travel through time. An Audi RS4 started crossing a bridge at a given time and, mysteriously enough, made it to the other side an hour earlier. At the end of the experiment, we solved the mystery: the bridge we’d chosen connected two cities in different time zones. Conclusion: you don’t need a time machine to see the technology of the future.

We used Facebook and YouTube to publish our spot. There were multiple reasons: most of our target audience there, for a start. Plus, we needed time to tell the story that wouldn’t have been feasible on TV. And audience interaction was fundamental, since we launched the action in real time.

The initiative started out with a teaser on social media, proposing the theory that Audi’s cars were so high-tech that they might have come from the future and announcing that to prove it, we’d try to travel through time. On the day of the experiment, we posted the video on Facebook and YouTube. In the end, our test showed that time travel was possible, which sparked lots of conversations on social media.

Since this was purely entertainment content, not a traditional commercial, consumers saw the experience differently. Audi saw a significant increase in brand awareness and engagement on social media.