The campaign brief was focused on improving brand relatability, improving our relationship with our drivers, and shifting the perception of how our riders view our drivers from functional to emotional. Additionally, to show the role Uber plays in supporting the modern striver mindset, providing a way for drivers to ignite and support their ambitions.

In 2018, Uber lost the trust of its most important customer: our drivers. To earn it back, we wanted to capture and share the stories of what drivers are passionate about and what they're really driving for. So, we went to Brooklyn and handed the keys to a master storyteller: Spike Lee. Thousands of drivers were interviewed, but only five were chosen. Spike rode along on their daily grind, documenting their hustle, like only a true Brooklynite could. In the spirit and essence of his films, we also created unique title sequences for each driver, to feature not only their Uber brand interactions but their personal passions.

The strategy was to humanize and celebrate our drivers by sharing the untold stories of why people choose to drive with Uber. To bring those stories to life in a unique way, by enlisting a legendary filmmaker to produce a series of five cinematic shorts about Brooklyn-based drivers who have hustle. And then to elevate the cultural impact by partnering with him to promote the campaign like a film release. Our target audience was both drivers and riders who use the platform, to help them better understand the personalities and passion of the people who move the business forward everyday.

Similar to a release of a motion picture, the films debuted in July of 2018 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Because the drivers being featured were all from Brooklyn, there was no other place we would debut this work. Spike was in attendance to share how these films came to life and answer any questions from the audience. The next day, July 12th 2018, all 5 films were pushed via email to the millions of drivers and riders on Ubers platform. Additionally, murals for the project were painted throughout the borough and OOH featuring our hero drivers, were placed across the country, again promoting these films in a similar fashion to a motion picture.

Overall, the campaign was extremely well received and successful from a metrics standpoint, garnering 196M impressions (8x our 1st party target audience size). Uber Presents paid marketing was successful at driving digital video views among our target audience including: 390k+ full-length film views to 100% completion (this alone represents 3.3M minutes of consumption!) and 21M completed :06, :30, 1:00 and 1:20 trailer views. Da Republic of Brooklyn campaign beat cost-per-Quality-Action benchmarks on both Facebook (-71%) and Instagram (-40%).