With the ultimate goal of broader awareness and consideration for our often forgotten brand, we needed to reach out to a new audience on a new stage. For current fans of the brand, they would see our messaging, but for those for whom Volvo was not top of mind, we used online video and targeted social advertising to get them ready for our Super Bowl Sunday activity. New activity from new users could mean a wider net of earned media, outside of our existing customers.

This campaign was centered around an online competition, one with a direct, time-sensitive call to action: Start your nomination in a tweet with #VolvoContest, but only during other car company's Super Bowl commercials. Broader spontaneous awareness and consideration are long-term success metrics for Volvo, but to kickoff a new phase of public awareness, we needed consumer involvement. If we wanted credit for stealing attention on Super Bowl Sunday, we needed people to connect with the brand directly.

The idea was simple. Instead of focusing on spending money to get attention, we wanted to give consumers the opportunity do something for a person who matters to them. This was directly aligned with Volvo's position as a brand that focuses on what matters to people. All someone had to do was tweet with #VolvoContest nominating their loved one. The catch: the tweet had to go out during another car company's Super Bowl commercial. Every tweet generated an auto-response from the brand that drove people to the next step - a short nomination form, allowing them space to explain why their nominee deserved one of 5 new Volvo XC60s. Online video and earned media coverage leading up to the Super Bowl let people know what they had to do, and real-time tweets from Volvo corresponding to in-game moments kept people participating for hours.

The reponse was astounding. All told, the campaign saw more than 230 million earned media impressions. With more than 55,000 tweets during the 3 hour telecast, #VolvoContest was the most-tweeted automotive hashtag on Super Bowl Sunday. #VolvoContest trended 3 times on Twitter and "Volvo" trended globally. Volvo was mentioned nearly 114,000 times on Twitter, 3rd-most of any automotive brand, all without a Super Bowl ad. Our online video passed 3,400,000 views in a week, and our website saw more than 116,000 visitors in 2 weeks. People were tweeting their children to nominate them, and several joined Twitter just for this campaign. Of the nearly 20,000 unique users who tweeted, more than 10,700 people filled out the nomination form (54% completion), giving us all those unique, wonderful stories to choose from. Most importantly, the XC60 had the highest February sales increase of any car in its segment (70.7% year-over-year).

Super Bowl Sunday is the biggest advertising day of the year. With brands spending $4.5 million for 30 seconds of airtime, we needed to make a much smaller budget work harder with direct, more efficient digital tactics that could steal attention away from bigger automotive brands on America's biggest stage. Online videos and targeted social advertising leading up to and during the Super Bowl made sure our limited dollars were driving maximum user engagement.