In the summer of 2015, Volkswagen presented a new brand campaign to improve their value-for-money perception. The theme: you expect more when you drive a Volkswagen. In the TV commercial we showed several family members who expected the same from everyday objects as from their Volkswagen.One scene drew extra attention: a stroller, which the mother expected to brake automatically. Volkswagen received a surprising number of responses to this on Facebook. Timo Ros, one of Volkswagen’s Facebook fans, thought this was a good idea and wondered why such a stroller doesn’t really exist. This comment provided a unique opportunity to address Timo’s question with an online film. This way we could create attention once again for Volkswagen’s innovations, generate free publicity and stimulate online involvement.

We didn’t turn it into a technical story, but summarized in a few short scenes how Timo was invited to build the first ‘prototype’ with a number of Volkswagen mechanics. This way we drew extra attention to two important Volkswagen technologies: ‘adaptive cruise control’ that lets cars keep their distance from the ones in front, and ‘break assist’, with which cars brake automatically in an emergency situation. Timo also talks enthusiastically about how cool it is to see his wish come true. Timo became the ambassador of the 180,000 Facebook fans, and brought their collective imagination to life in a prototype of the first stroller designed for and by Volkswagen fans. We left it up to the audience to decide whether the stroller really works, but the reactions in the film from people in the street are real.

1. Tier 1: awareness:

Initially, we aimed for 300,000 views generated by earned media. In the end, the video was viewed 2,231,864 times with an engagement rate of 1.2% and the video got shared vociferously on social media reaching a total of 5,494,500 impressions.

Tier 2: knowledge:

At the end of the campaign over 400 online publications had written about our video including Huffington Post, Buzzfeed and Yahoo. (e.g.: Gizmodo: ‘An Auto-Following Stroller Using VW's Adaptive Cruise Control Is Genius’)

Volkswagen got showered with positive interest. Volkswagen Headquarters in Germany received questions from interested journalists from all over the world, and was even shown on prime time TV in Germany, Brazil and Turkey

Tier 3: output

- A 538% return on media investment worth 350,000 euros (65,000 euros invested)