Volkswagen Hover Car
Volkwagen Group China
Issue 23 | June 2012
Agency
Proximity China/Goodstein & Partners
Creative Team
Executive Creative Director: Georg Warga; Associate Creative Directors: Felipe Ferreira, Daryl Villanueva, Flavio Vidigal; Copywriters: Jojo Zhang, Vivian Liu, Derek Lui; Art Directors: Hymn Wong, Andy Li; Junior Art Director: Fang Ji; Designer: Sofia Lv
Production Team
Agency Producer: Inna Pan; Director: Kosai Sekine; Production Company: Stink Shanghai; Executive Producer: Desmond Loh
Background
The People's Car Project had shifted Volkswagen from being a company that built cars for the people to a company that built cars with the people.
It was an invitation to Chinese people to go online and use the 3D Car Creator and start co-creating the cars of the future.
Visitors could vote for the ideas they liked the best and social networks then distributed those ideas further.
Idea
Now the idea was to nudge the idea along with a viral.
One designer, username Dark520, was tracked down and identified as Wang Jia, a girl in her early twenties.
Her design was turned into what appeared to be a real car. Only it had no wheels and was able to hover.
In the viral film, the car was test-driven by Wang's mother and father in the streets of their home city and to the general amazement.
The action was further developed by making a second film of Wang Jia being lured by a friend to a theatre, where she was surprised by being shown the film of her car being driven by her parents – and honoured with a Volkswagen blueprint of her design.
Results
The campaign attracted 33 million unique visitors. Over 121,000 ideas were submitted. 3.1 million fans follow us on social networks. In just 10 weeks, Volkswagen became the top car brand on social media, surpassing BMW, Mini, and Mercedes.
Our Thoughts
The link between VW's name in Chinese and this platform is obviously a great fit. The expanding campaign with its continual launching of virals, each artfully executed, confirms the effort is here for the long-term. If only the hover car, or another end result were for real.