The GTI Project
Challenge
The golf GTI is an icon – the original hot hatch, loved by pre-family, affluent men. They’re urban, style-conscious ‘early adopters’, the kind of people who know their brands and what they stand for. They love driving and care about the performance of their car over ostentation. We needed to find an original and captivating way to attract these men and get them experiencing the new GTI VI.
Solution
Our approach was to bring the fun of driving the new GTI VI to life. We created The GTI Project: a game that allows people to relive the boyish fun of their youths by tapping into the nostalgia of when they first learnt to love driving.
Inspired by the true story behind the car’s history: the first GTI was built in secret by Volkswagen engineers in their spare time, purely out of a love for performance motoring. The project features a restricted access workroom in the Volkswagen factory, where an extraordinary 30ftx25ft Scalextric racetrack has been built. Between the 200 buildings of a gleaming model city, the GTI engineers are racing their new car in miniature, no less fine-tuned and expertly engineered than its full size counterpart.
Players can become immersed in the familiar Scalextrics race; taking control, crashing round corners, setting their own fast lap, then challenging their friends to do better. This virtual track engages people with the real emotional reward of a GTI, not that it’s flashy, but that its fun. Ultimately, it’s about the thrill of driving – something that GTI engineers and drivers seem to understand instinctively.
This all digital launch campaign comprised social media outreach, email activity, rich media online ads and traffic drivers on www.volkswagen.co.uk all driving to the GTI Project microsite.
Impact
Since going live on 8th May, the site has generated over two million page views and 350000 unique users, spending an average of eight minutes on the site.
The site has exploded across a multitude of online communities, with our outreach resulting in over 39000 sites now linking to the microsite. Sites like drivers-republic have taken it a step further, creating their own custom league competitions on the GTI Project, with the attractive prizes like a day at Millbrook, test-driving the new GTI under professional racer supervision.
Posts and comments range from Portuguese to Polish, Twitter is generating a huge social buzz with tweets like ‘Best interactive marketing that I’ve seen in ages!’ and ‘I love websites that are not a simple click and view, enjoy GTI Project’.
Most importantly, this all digital campaign met its ambitious sales targets within one month of the car launch.
