2015 Winners & Shortlists

The Campaign

Even though branded entertainment is on the rise in the Middle East, it’s still not close to its full potential. Many are attempting to harness the opportunity with brand audiences becoming increasingly mobile, demanding and consuming content. We noticed, however, that regardless of this rise, the majority of content is random, imported, and not authentic to the region. Our audience is hungry for something that resonated on a local and global level. As it stands now, most pieces of branded content involve logo addition to existing campaigns. It’s rare that a live experience is developed to entertain and elevate the brand with the core proposition and product really at its core.

Results

SUMMARY: Infiniti is a challenger brand and the QX70, marketed as “The Original”, was the first crossover in the world, creating a whole new category of vehicles. Since the QX70 is the most iconic model within the Infiniti line up, going down a conventional path to promote the new QX70S Elite Sport was out of the question. THE CHALLENGE We needed to re-energize interest in the QX70 in a market that’s cluttered with near-identical advertising. THE OBJECTIVES: Launch the QX70S Elite Sport model in a unique way that steers away from traditional mediums and boosts the QX70 line up. THE STRATEGY: Turn the brand philosophy “Inspired performance” into a first-hand tangible experience that goes beyond performance yet still celebrates the car’s expressive, forward-thinking nature. EXECUTIONS In a world-first, Infiniti teamed up with a light-painter and stunt drivers to create a category-busting piece of communication made up of dynamic shapes and powerful moving canvases. The world’s leading light painter, Patrick Rochon, directed this intricate 'original' performance. Each car took four experienced technicians 8 hours to rig. There are no light bulbs on the rigs, and no special effects were used. Each QX70S has 18 meters of LED strips carefully fixed in place.

Our dynamic audience of young minded, open, independent, constantly connected individuals are strongly submerged in visual, digital and creative cultures. They crave authenticity, originality and inspiration and are hungry for content, for art, for progress, and for innovative entertainment. We wanted to take advantage of this fact and co-create with them something out of the ordinary. The central piece of our strategy was the live event where our audience could experience for the first time in the world, the light painting art form and co-create.

The live event attracted a crowd of over 10,000 people that engaged with the brand in person. They created their own light portraits and light painted on stage with Patrick and continued the conversation on social media, gaining 28,000 shares on Facebook and Twitter. Inspired light was the most engaging and most visible campaign with 7.8M-reach, 2M views and 142K-interactions across all social media platforms (YouTube and Facbeook). The project's content was a breakthrough and transportable concept for being the 1st-ever-project of it’s kind in the region. Influencer support had a great impact from an organic perspective with 588+ additional mentions, and a total #InspiredLight mention of 3,672. Our Facebook fan base grew by 126% vs yearly average (226M fans now). Twitter fan base grew by 140% vs yearly average – (35,500 fans now - second best in the region) as well as 10% sales increase on the car QX70S-Elite-Sport after the event vs QX70-average monthly sales, aiding in making it the Middle East's fastest growing premium automotive brand.