Before the EX90, Volvo had not launched a new model for 18 months. Furthermore, as with other car manufacturers, Volvo’s supply chain was challenged by the semiconductor shortage. And it showed on the stock price.

Volvo needed a launch event that would give Volvo large-scale global press coverage to make a mark big enough for investors to feel it.

The brief was to create a live and digital global reveal event for the safest car in Volvo’s history. Volvo’s new flagship, the fully electric EX90 SUV, combines breakthrough sensing technology and core computing to form a shield of safety around its occupants.

The key objective for the launch was to position Volvo as a challenger in the industry by redefining their leadership position on safety through the EX90's technological innovations.

More specifically the objectives of the event were:

Global press coverage

Press coverage by tech media

Pre-orders of the EX90

To launch Volvo’s safest car yet and make it relevant to consumers, our agency set out to reframe safety all together. From being safe to feeling safe. From understanding the features, to feeling them. Humanising the core technology behind the new EX90. In the darkness of winter we created an immersive installation space of warmth and colour with the new Volvo as the beating heart. A physical shield of safety that demonstrated the car's ability to sense its surroundings in real time, welcoming, guiding, and interacting with visitors. A physical, immersive experience cocooning the EX90 in the centre of Stockholm, displaying its key technology on an epic scale.

To build future demand and position the EX90 as the beginning of a new era for safety for Volvo, our team needed to reach a new audience. We focused these growth ambitions on an audience segment we called ‘The Mobility Pioneers’: the consumer who is less attached to the current automotive paradigm and adopts a much broader mobility perspective. They always look for new ideas, trends, innovations and technological developments that inspire them.

To reach this new audience and become relevant to them, we needed to do two things:

1) Humanise the technology to make it feel inspiring and relevant to the audience in a way that did follow category standards

2) Ensure the message is covered in publications outside the automotive industry. For this reason, we added a specific objective on press coverage by tech media

The launch was in Kungsträdgården, a public square in the centre of Stockholm. Out of home, print, digital and social was used with the live-streamed launch to bring the event to a global audience. The responsive structure welcomed passers-by with a proximity-based interactive light show. Visitors journeyed into the multi-sensory space past bespoke digital displays including a live Lidar point cloud, to meet the EX90.

The event was held from 9th-13th November, 2022. The reveal was seen by over 4.4m viewers and the space attracted over 6,000 people in 3 days. The initial media run extended into February 2023.

The approach marked Volvo Cars’ most impactful launch to date. Marking a shift towards a focus on technology, the launch was extensively covered in high-reach tech media such as The Verge and CNET.com with tech media making up 15% of the total press coverage.

Within 7 days after the launch, the new EX90 was the most visible model in traditional media. 2.3K articles were published with potential reach of 443 million within 5 days of the event, plus 837M reach in traditional media in first 3 weeks (1.4B gross reach in total).

The launch received the attention from end-consumers:

4,4M people tuned in to the live stream

6000 public visitors to the event space

In the end, this resulted in pre-orders exceeding expectations globally by 10x. The share price increased by more than 10 points when looking at the period in between the few days.