This paper describes how the provision of an interactive experience with a Mercedes-Benz car led to the fastest-ever payback for an automotive campaign, in a major effectiveness awards competition, anywhere in the world.

This achievement came by tackling a long-running problem. Namely: the perception that Mercedes-Benz cars are for mature drivers; the reward at the end of a career rather than the companion during it.

The marketing objective was therefore to make 25-49 year olds re-appraise Mercedes-Benz and directly increase the level of enquiries from this group. This, it was hoped, would drive a 5% increase in Mercedes-Benz’s new car sales, year-on-year.

Achieving this with a traditional ‘message’ through broadcast media was cost-prohibitive. Simultaneously, research with our audience steered us towards a very different approach: of directly providing younger drivers with experience of Mercedes-Benz cars through digital interaction, achieving engagement through cross-platform story-telling and consequently earning credentials with our audience rather than simply claiming them.

The creative result was Escape the Map. A five-month long campaign that both told and hosted the interactive story of a girl’s quest to escape a dystopian world in a Mercedes-Benz C-Class Coupe. A world of unforeseen threats and countdown clocks, played out through various online and offline communications channels, where the best accomplice was an especially dynamic car.

The campaign achieved very high levels of engagement. More than three-quarters of a million people spent almost five and half minutes on the website. This had the intended effect on brand perception, with record scores for people agreeing that: ‘Mercedes-Benz cars are driven by younger people, not just older people’.

Behaviour followed suit: Mercedes-Benz website visits reached four times their monthly average in a single day. Test drive requests went up 148%. And, most importantly, our younger cohort of buyers spearheaded a 9% increase in sales versus the previous year – almost doubling the objective – providing a positive return on investment within just five months of campaign launch.