We chose the biggest business network in the Netherlands, LinkedIn, to let professionals battle each other to find out who is actually most full of himself, in a likewise manner: LinkedOut. Who has the best educations, the most convincing recommendations and the most contacts in his network? Professionals started battling, and got to discover all the new features of the new Passat.By choosing a relative way, we stick close to the heritage of the Volkswagen brand and keep the sympathy of the professional audience. By choosing the LinkedIn network, we addressed the core audience at the place where they, without saying it out loud, measure their professional success constantly. By choosing the LinkedOut mechanism, we emphasise our core message in a subtle way that the new Passat is now “full of itself” due to all those new standard features.

As Volkswagen launched the first interactive campaign on LinkedIn, LinkedOut got worldwide attention and free publicity. By integrating Twitter in the battles, we generated lots of interaction between professionals directly. Within two weeks, 132,000 people in the Netherlands had played LinkedOut, generating 180,000 tweets and over 60 blogposts. Participants of the campaign got a 20% higher preference towards the Passat than non-players.