2013 Winners & Shortlists

The Campaign

Branded Content and Entertainment advocates have sprung up quite spontaneously in the region over the past two years. The craft was nurtured, one idea at a time until big network agencies started appointing individual divisions and hiring "content kings" to run their dedicated departments. Today, however, the more popular manifestations of Branded Entertainment are centered around fictional or non-fictional television content, including a recently concluded programming series by a telecommunications company in the UAE. Add to these the proliferation of the now proverbial bevy of flash mobs. Hardly any branded content was produced for outdoor and offline media, while several attempts were done for digital, particularly on augmented reality. Gaming, however, is expected to be the next big opportunity, especially if executed with mobile connectivity and social media integration. This is where we thought MINI could be an early adopter, specifically for its sub-brand, John Cooper Works - which is more about the thrill and exhilaration of racing than the fascinating cars themselves. We knew we had very little opportunity to offer such branded experiences with the the limited number of test drive cars. A virtual experiential game, complete with social media sharing capabilities then became the irrefutable solution.

Results

The Middle East market is heavily dominated by cars with automatic transmission, a fact that MINI found a bit challenging since its highly popular sub-brand, MINI John Cooper Works, is known elsewhere in the world as a racing legend powered by highly adept manual gearboxes. With the launch of the new automatic gearshifts on the Cooper and Countryman models then, MINI knew its cult-following would not only rejoice, but the car market in general, would now find MINI a lot more desirable, if not covetable. To generate launch awareness, we started the campaign with traditional print and online efforts. To facilitate consumer engagement, a drive event in the form of a roadshow was organized for key markets like Dubai, Abu Dhabi, KSA, Oman and Qatar. But on top of awareness and engagement, we also needed "reach" which was close to impossible since the roadshow could only accommodate a limited number of prospects. We then created the MINI John Cooper Works Racing Challenge, a digital game complete with iPads as steering controls and an interactive video projection serving as the vibrant and larger than life racetrack. Onsite at the drive events, prospects were more than delighted to discover a new digital driving platform. In the presence of live spectators, they raced against each other in their very own, albeit virtual, MINI John Cooper Works automatic gearshift competition cars. The best part, which answered the need to reach a wider target audience, was the social media capabilities of the branded game. Players were given the opportunity to brag about their driving achievements by sharing their race results as actual MINI John Cooper Works posts on their Facebook profiles. They also had the opportunity to brag about the outcome of their branded experience by sharing the link of the live Facebook leader board.

Racing is the lifeblood of MINI John Cooper Works, in the same way that winning against peers is crucial to our target market. When a select group of prospects were then invited to a drive event, they were of course expecting to take the new automatic models for a spin. What they were not prepared for was the digital game, where they got to virtually race against each other using iPads as controls on an interactive video projection, the results of which they got to share as posts on their Facebook profiles and as links to a live Facebook leaderboard.

Around 3000 MINI enthusiasts got to play the virtual racing game, an experience they treasured in the same measure they enjoyed the thrill of driving the MINI John Cooper Works automatic cars on a racetrack. While they raved about their actual drive experience on their social media networks, they bragged more about their unexpected virtual driving thrill, especially because they had solid proof of accomplishment to boot. Some players even elicited endless discussions with peers who reacted to their branded Facebook posts. All in all, more 900 shares and posts on the MINI John Cooper Works Virtual Racing Game was generated on Facebook. This does not include the countless other friends who were exposed to these 900 published stories on Facebook. For MINI Middle East, this is a branded viral they would not have achieved via conventional test drive events.