Background

• Situation

• Brief

• Objectives

The Corolla Special Edition was launched in 2018 and we were tasked to create a social campaign for it as well as highlight the full Corolla range, for continued awareness. We did that…and then some.

Beyond the brief from our longstanding client, we saw an opportunity to create a one-of-a-kind billboard that could not only celebrate South Africa’s most loved car, but also share the love with the community where the Corolla has been built.

• Demonstrate how the idea was designed to earn attention from the target audience

In South Africa tons of international outdoor is copied and pasted all along major highways without any consideration for cultural context. Added to this, the billboard industry contributes massive amounts of plastic waste annually.

For Heritage Month we wanted to celebrate South Africa’s most loved car, the Toyota Corolla, by cutting through the culturally blind clutter and the plastic waste.

So, we created the biggest beaded billboard, ever! The billboard referenced the Zulu love letter: a beaded gift, usually pinned to a lover’s chest, made up of different patterns and colours. But instead of being a palm-sized love letter, we created one that weighed almost a ton. And we got the community where the Corolla has been manufactured for decades to help us make this one-of-a-kind celebration of love.

Describe the PR strategy (30% of vote)

Our news cycles are filled with negative headlines around surging crime statistics and growing poverty. This is why South Africans love a feel-good story. So, to celebrate South Africa’s most loved car, the Toyota Corolla, we wanted to create a “good-news” story that had was locally relevant and encouraged cultural pride.

Because the Toyota Corolla is South Africa’s most-loved car its target market is very broad, so we had to make the messaging easily understandable and relatable. This is why we tapped into the iconic love language of the Zulu love letter.

Ultimately, we wanted to tell more than just a story of a billboard – we wanted to tell the story of the community of beaders at Woza Moya that collaborated with us to create this labour of love.

To celebrate South Africa’s best selling- and most loved car – the Toyota Corolla, we partnered with Woza Moya, the economic empowerment project of the Hillcrest AIDS centre Trust, in KZN to help us execute a one-of-a-kind Zulu Love Letter billboard. That’s right, a whole billboard made up of beads.

With this one very special billboard we wanted to cut through the clutter of outdoor advertising that is often international work pasted along the highway without consideration for cultural context or relevance.

The assembled love letter consisting of 380 000 hand stitched beads, weighing in at almost a ton, was crane lifted onto a truck bed and transported to Joburg where it was put up along side the M1 highway for a diverse audience of approximately 214 422 cars that drive past daily.

It stayed there for most of heritage month and once it came down all the beads were

• Action/business results – sales, donations, site traffic, achievement against business target

• Outcomes/awareness – change in behavior, reach, public opinion, content response

We spread a good-news story in a news cycle dominated by negative headlines. And we did this by investing in a single billboard. In total we got R3095232 in earned media with a single billboard. The investment in a single billboard gave us a return on investment of 417%. And we were able to triple a group of craftswomen’s income for 2 months by investing in this one billboard.