IndiaSocial Case Challenge – edition 1

Category: Short-term Projects

Winner of Position #1

Title : Mitsubishi Cedia Sports – the Great Driving Challenge

Share a little about your organisation

Experience Commerce delivers online marketing solutions that cover the entire value chain, from digital strategy to execution and results. All our campaigns are managed dynamically, backed up by real-time statistics and analysis.

EC is well known in the market for creating immensely successful social media led campaigns which are innovative in design and engaging in experience.

Executive Summary

Hindustan Motors (HML) well understood the sentiments of a Cedia owner. Consumer research reiterated that a loyal Cedia owner loved to get behind its wheels and just drive. So when it was time to launch the new Mitsubishi Cedia sports, HML wanted to reach out to their target audience and engage the travel fanatics in conversations around “a long drive”. This vision led to the creation of (one of) India’s largest and most buzzed digital-led campaign, aptly titled “Great Driving Challenge”.

Background

We wanted travel aficionados from all over the country to come together, driven by a mutual passion for enjoying a long drive. The Web was a natural medium for engagement, as it provided multiple social platforms, diverse communities, and tools to encourage participation, conversation, and consumption of content.

Approach/ Strategy

Please share details about the initiative stating clearly the strategy, objectives, goals, the duration, resources and budgets allocated.

Our vision was to engage a community of travel fanatics around the idea of a long-drive – a getaway. Each applicant couple was provided their personal blogging space on the site to share past travelogues, travel pictures, videos, and their travel plans. By making the event open for “couples only”, we ensured the entire family & friend network was rallying behind contestants.

The central idea of the campaign was powerful and appealed to the workaholics to take a break from their daily grind and escape on an all-expenses paid 10 day Trip in a brand new Mitsubishi.

Once the core audience was engaged with the campaign idea, we supported the launch with an Internet ad campaign. However, we received more quality audience from Facebook, Blogs and organic search than paid Internet advertisements, thus making TGDC a truly ‘social media powered’ campaign.

The campaign extended for two months during summer 2009.

Stakeholders

Which stakeholders did you engage through this initiative and how? How was/ has this initiative been received by them so far?
Though the campaign was digital-led, it included on-ground events and was not going to be a success without team work. The Brand campaign was supported by Contract Advertising and the on-ground event was wholly managed by Encompass. It was important that the finalists derived the same experience off-line as they had experienced on-line and all agencies did a terrific job.

The brand – Mitsubishi – remained supportive of every request made by the contestants, agreeing to last minute giveaways.

About the initiative

Share details about your activities, touch-points that you created/ channels you used to reach the stakeholders.

To win the contest, applicants had to share their travel stories from the road via microblogs, photo-updates, videos etc.
Each applicant couple was provided their personal blogging space on greatdrivingchallenge.com, to share their past travelogues, travel pictures, videos, and their travel plans. The application process itself was a lot of fun, and meant long hours of family time – planning and dreaming about the event.

The campaign was advertised in print media, and the finalists chosen at an on ground event.

Impact – Outcome

What was the impact achieved vis-à-vis goals set? How did you measure the impact/ results?

TGDC saw 2,000 sign-ups in the first few hours itself; over 50% had already started meaningful applications by Hour 3. By end of Day 1 over 300 people had completed meaningful applications, uploaded photos, mashed up their flickr streams, annotated their Google maps, and were ready to reach out on their social graph for testimonials and votes.

The average stay time for people creating application was over an hour. Our jaws dropped! We were prepared for a long haul to entice applicants to fill up their forms (blogs), but the core of the community had formed faster than we dreamed possible.

Results

• Unique Visitors in a month: 6,50,000 +
• Page views in a month: 69,00,000 +
• Max page views for a day: 7,50,000 +
• Blog Citings: 120 +
• Total Votes Cast: 3,20,000
• Sign ups: 18,000 +
• Total Testimonials Cast: 13,000 +
• Alexa India Rank: 551

It was important for us as a Digital Agency in India, to measure the ROI on print. The traffic volume was in line with our expectations, and our gut feeling came through as we saw very high quality of traffic – a super-low bounce rate of <6%, and conversion ratio of >25%. This far exceeded benchmarks for brand supported destinations that we had seen in our past projects

Learnings

What were the key learnings? Positive and things to do better; share any challenges you might have faced.

Like traffic, reaching our target age demographic – mature community of 25+ – was barely a challenge. Back during the concept stage, a team-member had speculated, “Who will have so much time to spend online, creating applications?”

TGDC busted the myth that social media content is created mostly by the youth. Married couples with families and kids to look after, and jobs that take over most of their days make time for their passions on the internet too. The average age of applicants ranged from 25-60years, with a median around 31.
One couple in their sixties defended their age in the application, arguing they were the best couple because… “29 states, 13 countries, 15000 KM per year drive and 35 years of experience. Beat that! ”

The trickiest part of the challenge was making sure the three couples would be able to upload social media content from the heart of rural India. By that point of TGDC, we had a large community hinged on every piece of content published on the site.
We equipped the teams with high speed data cards, computers and cameras so they could blog and upload multimedia from the road. Eventually, we had to integrate text messaging to ensure a constant flow of content, even where data connection was not available.

What Next

Where is the programme/ initiative now? Where will it go from here?

Wait and see

Reasoning

What in your opinion makes your programme/ initiative/ activity a case-study/ best practice case.

Apart from the outstanding above-mentioned numbers we reached and buzz we generated, feedback from the participants – even those who didn’t make it. One of them mused on Facebook, “Aapney hamaara taste kharaab kar diya hai ..!! With the kind of experience TGDC gave, any other online contest looks so lil baby in front of it !!! u da best !!!”

Credits – Strategy

Experience Commerce

Credits – Execution

Contract Advertising and Encompass

Testimonials

“The Great Driving Challenge is not only a path breaker in automobile marketing but also a lodestar in the convergence of new media with traditional media. It represents how seamlessly we can integrate digital media with traditional media and maximize reach, frequency and impact.” – Pritam Saikia, Head of Marketing, Hindustan Motors

“I’ve been watching the GDC unfold from day one and gotta say: This was BRILLIANT marketing by HM-Mitsubishi. Not once in the past 5 years had so many people visited an HM-Mitsubishi website, or had their brands created such a buzz in the market. I know for a fact that other brands are watching closely and will be coming out with their own in-house versions of the GDC soon. Coming from a manufacturer which has effectively over-slept (while the competition walked all over) was most unexpected. I hope some of this new found vigour rubs off on HM’s product planning division (new Lancer, EVO X anyone?).” – Read on Team-BHP Forum (India’s hottest destination for Auto Fanatics)

Factsheet

Name of the company: Experience Commerce

Number of Employees:11-50

Category: Other

Case submitted by:Nidhi Makhija, Digital Marketing

Website: http://experiencecommerce.com