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Volvo S60 Augmented Reality App & Generated 9.6% Interaction Rate

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Big brands always play with innovative ideas and that’s the reason they sometimes end up doing a commendable job as far as digital marketing and promotion is concerned. There are many such instances where creativity led to extraordinary results in digital marketing campaigns. With big brands it’s like a gamble, because an innovative ad is no guarantee of success.  It becomes even more risky especially when there is a crucial target such as a product launch and saving a sinking brand. Recently, VolvoS60 has done this commendable job and created 9.6% interaction rate on YouTube, which is huge.

The challenge

Volv2

The challenge was to showcase a car that was fun to drive and the advertising managers at Volve wanted to do it in a different way.  Traditionally, the practice was to feature a smart gentleman driving a luxury car in the most scenic places and alongside grand historical buildings to add the touch of glamour and aristocracy. He used to be accompanied by a pretty girl-friend or wife. But, this was run of the mill stuff, especially when the demographics and user behavior of online audience is changing.

Marketing Strategy

A closer analysis reveals that there is an online populace between 21-40 years of age and it is quite fond of innovative ideas. Gaming is also popular in a world full of smartphones and portable gaming devices. The target was to give the audience a feel of being behind the wheels. But, it was a challenge as to how to implement it online. Then they came up with an innovative idea. What about creating an augmented reality driving experience? They created an app featuring a game known as “augmented reality driving game” for Volve S60.  Then they partnered with YouTube to promote that game in order to reach millions of gaming fans and passionate drivers. The car outline shown in the game was to be matched up with the Volvo S60 on their smartphone screens. And whoa! The users were ready to enjoy driving a brand new Volvo S60 lookalike.

Record engagement

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Image credit – marketingland. Com

It was a smart way to engage the smartphone friendly audience and the game was available just within the banner ad. This imparted life to the newly introduced car and created a huge buzz in the digital media. Now, the wonderful idea of using augmented reality to showcase the car facilitated greater interaction with the users and prospects. You can’t think of a better way to interact with a brand like this sitting in your drawing room or office. The Volvo campaign proved that innovation always pays off rich dividends. Allowing users to drive the car right through the room they were in gave its campaign a big boost. For the first time, the users were able to feel the brand new Volvo racing through their apartments.

Rich dividends

In terms of stats, it gave wonderful results. As far as purchase intent was concerned, there was around 90% increase and the brand favorability went up by nearly 250%. This was music to the ears of the innovative advertisers. It also became a wonderful case study for other advertisers globally beating all industry benchmarks. If you’re an advertising professional, you’ll certainly be stunned by these numbers.

As far as interaction rate is concerned it was 9.6%, which is again huge. Nearly 200,000 engagement clicks made the advertisers happy. The biggest boost came in terms of the increased traffic in the official website of Volvo cars. It was whopping 300%. It is enough to boost the sales of a newly launched car to a noticeable figure.

A good example of growth hacking:

Growth-hacking

So, the marketers achieved all their goals, viz, announcing the launch of Volvo S60 in a popular way and engaging the young and smartphone friendly audience. It also change the brand perception, as till yet Volvo was considered to be a premium luxury car that was out of reach for the common masses. Rather, it helped the younger audiences identify with the brand in a fun way. It was done through creating interactive banner units online.

Brand awareness through gaming

It should be noted here that adverting with games doesn’t guarantee a sizeable increase in the eyeballs, but it definitely ascertains engagement. In many such cases where gaming is used to promote the products, brand awareness has increased by up to six times. Volvo is not the only one, which has experimented with this idea; earlier H&M and MTV Networks have also tried it successfully. Social games such as Candy Crush Saga and Farmville are already very popular.  Number of people playing FarmVille on Facebook exceeds 30 million every day. With iPhone, you have got the best gaming device in your pocket and therefore you can easily spot daily commuters in the metro trains playing games on their smartphones. Volvo just capitalized this trend as a good growth hacker.

Image Credits: Google Images

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