General Motors spent nearly a decade engineering an eBike designed as a sustainable mode of transportation. Its development stayed secret and untitled.

For two years, the agency crafted an inspiring story and filmed prototypes to showcase the bike across the planet.

In this fast future of urban mobility, rumours of the launch started to fly.

Everyone was wondering what we were up to, so we embraced the international community of cyclists to help us pre-launch. We harnessed the collective creativity and passion to help imagine a new brand together.

They would Name the Future.

Utilizing our proprietary consumer research tool, CCS™, alongside social listening tools and by leveraging data from our Global Media Partners (such as Facebook, Google & Twitter) we were able to understand our audience and potential communities who would have the skills and talent to help us create a brand.

Target audience: Cycling community and students of design schools and colleges not only would become our future commercial target, cyclists.

The focus for PR was to engage the media and tell the story of eBikes in the context GM’s larger corporate mission to shape the future of urban transportation. Paid media was used to announce the brand name challenge, drive traffic to the landing page and encourage participation via simple and succinct messaging in key cities.

The call to action was simple: Name The Future

The campaign was largely centered in Europe and North America, although our press and engagement spanned across 33 global markets.

A combination of PR initiatives and promoted social content drove members of the cycling community to a microsite where they could submit their own vision of how they saw the future.

The campaign centred entirely around PR and social media.

A JOYFUL RIDE: The small but mighty three-week campaign blossomed entirely in

PR and social.

Participants emerged from 33 markets across the globe; the winning name hailed from Sunnyvale, California.

• 10,980 very futuristic name ideas

• An additional 2,802 comments

• Over 2000 pre-order inquiries

We introduced ARiV in early 2019 as a brand powered by its people.

Months later, we're still getting some pretty great ideas from the community, for the future.