Collecting the ‘Best Viral’ award

It was a great pleasure to be able to collect the ‘Best Viral’ award at the Brand Republic Digital Awards this week.

The Clio VaVaVoom test drive campaign that we (Renault UK, with Manning Gottlieb OMD, Unruly and Scorch London) was judged to be the best in this category, which also included entries from Kellogg’s, Whyte & Mackay and Marks & Spencer.

The campaign emerged from a brief to take a small proportion of the UK launch budget for the New Clio and ‘make it work harder’. We wanted to go beyond the traditional launch activity and find a new of talking to a younger target audience.

The total budget (production + media) for the campaign could easily have been spent on a single TV spot.

Part of the rationale for campaign was that we had been able to guarantee some results, but we had no idea quite what it was going to achieve.

Watching a campaign truly ‘go viral’ over the course of 48 hours following its launch was an immense buzz. It was a slow start for the first few hours, watching the view count slowly increase, but then the coverage started to flow.

Mashable’s article was one of the first to get shared in volume and it just took off from there. The coverage that followed was widespread, from the likes of The Drum, Marketing Week, The Scottish Sun – and even the Daily Mail.

We estimated that the ROI of the media coverage alone was probably at least 8:1. The videos topped the Viral Video Chart and Youtube’s ‘Most Shared’ list.

70,000 shares and 3 million views followed within the next few days, with over 5 million minutes of branded content being watched.

As well as the Brand Republic award, the campaign also received motor trade recognition – from the tough audience that is car dealers – picking up the 2013 Car Dealer Power award for ‘Best Manufacturer Marketing Initiative’.

It all came from being brave. Do your research, know what’s possible and go for it.